half-a-sovereign and found twelve hundred and fifty pounds in looking
for it, and instead of that horrid hole, for which, after all,
Eldorado was hardly a misnomer, a very different scene stretched away
before us clad in the silver robe of the moonlight. We were camped--
Harry and I, two Kaffirs, a Scotch cart, and six oxen--on the swelling
side of a great wave of bushclad land. Just where we had made our
camp, however, the bush was very sparse, and only grew about in
clumps, while here and there were single flat-topped mimosa-trees. To
our right a little stream, which had cut a deep channel for itself in
the bosom of the slope, flowed musically on between banks green with
maidenhair, wild asparagus, and many beautiful grasses. The bed-rock
here was red granite, and in the course of centuries of patient
washing the water had hollowed out some of the huge slabs in its path
into great troughs and cups, and these we used for bathing-places. No
Roman lady, with her baths of porphyry or alabaster, could have had a
more delicious spot to bathe herself than we found within fifty yards
of our skerm, or rough inclosure of mimosa thorn, that we had dragged
together round the cart to protect us from the attacks of lions. That
there were several of these brutes about, I knew from their spoor,
though we had neither heard nor seen them.

"Our bath was a little nook where the eddy of the stream had washed
away a mass of soil, and on the edge of it there grew a most beautiful
old mimosa thorn. Beneath the thorn was a large smooth slab of granite
fringed all round with maidenhair and other ferns, that sloped gently
down to a pool of the clearest sparkling water, which lay in a bowl of
granite about ten feet wide by five feet deep in the centre. Here to
this slab we went every morning to bathe, and that delightful bath is
among the most pleasant of my hunting reminiscences, as it is also,
for reasons which will presently appear, among the most painful.