CHAPTER II

HOW SUZANNE FOUND RALPH KENZIE

Our farm where we lived in the Transkei was not very far from the ocean;
indeed, any one seated in the _kopje_ or little hill at the back of the
house, from the very top of which bubbles a spring of fresh water, can
see the great rollers striking the straight cliffs of the shore and
spouting into the air in clouds of white foam. Even in warm weather they
spout thus, but when the south-easterly gales blow then the sight and
the sound of them are terrible as they rush in from the black water
one after another for days and nights together. Then the cliffs shiver
beneath their blows, and the spray flies up as though it were driven
from the nostrils of a thousand whales, and is swept inland in clouds,
turning the grass and the leaves of the trees black in its breath. Woe
to the ship that is caught in those breakers and ground against those
rocks, for soon nothing is left of it save scattered timbers shivered as
though by lightning.

One winter--it was when Suzanne was seven years old--such a south-east
gale as this blew for four days, and on a certain evening after the wind
had fallen, having finished my household work, I went to the top of the
_kopje_ to rest and look at the sea, which was still raging terrible,
taking with me Suzanne. I had been sitting there ten minutes or more
when Jan, my husband, joined me, and I wondered why he had come, for he,
as brave a man as ever lived in all other things, was greatly afraid
of the sea, and, indeed, of any water. So afraid was he that he did not
like the sight of it in its anger, and would wake at nights at the sound
of a storm--yes, he whom I have seen sleep through the trumpetings of