said, "Look at this stick; I bought it from a boy on a South
African Farm. Do you understand what the carvings mean?"

"Hanged if I do!" I said, after turning it about.

"Well, do you see that figure?" and he touched a thing like a Noah
out of a child's ark. "That was a hunter like you, my friend, but
not in all respects. That hunter pursued a vast white bird with
silver wings, sailing in the everlasting blue."

"Everlasting bosh!" said I; "there is no bird of the kind on the
veldt."

"That bird was Truth," says the Stranger, "and, judging from the
anecdote you tell me about the Babyan woman and the Zulu medicine-
man, it is a bird YOU don't trouble yourself with much, my friend."

This was a pretty cool thing to say to a man whose veracity is
known like a proverb from Sheba's Breasts to the Zambesi.

Foide Macumazahn, the Zulus say, meaning as true as a yarn of Allan
Quatermain's. Well, my blood was up; no man shall call Allan
Quatermain a liar. The fellow was going on with a prodigious
palaver about a white feather of Truth, and Mount Sinai, and the
Land of Absolute Negation, and I don't know what, but I signified
to him that if he did not believe my yarns I did not want his
company. "I'm sorry to turn you out," I said, "for there are lions
around"--indeed they were roaring to each other--"and you will have
a parroty time. But you apologise, or you go!"