became furious too and rated him.

Should he be wrath with the Little Chieftainess Imba, she asked him,
because the _Isitunzis_, the spirits of the dead, loved her as did
everything else? Did they not understand that the Floweret was unlike
them, one adored of dead and living, one to be cherished even in her
dreams, one whom "Heaven Above," together with those who had "gone
below," built round with a wall of spells?--and more of such talk,
which Thomas thought so horrible and blasphemous that he fled before its
torrent.

But when he came back calmer he said no more to Tabitha about her
escapade.



It was a long while afterwards, at the beginning of the great drought,
that another terrible thing happened. On a certain calm and beautiful
day Tabitha, who still grew and flourished, had taken some of the
Christian children to a spot on the farther side of the koppie, where
stood an old fortification originally built for purposes of defence.
Here, among the ancient walls, with the assistance of the natives, she
had made a kind of summer-house as children love to do, and in this
house, like some learned eastern pundit in a cell, a very pretty pundit
crowned with a wreath of flowers, she sat upon the ground and instructed
the infant mind of Sisa-Land.

She was supposed to be telling them Bible stories to prepare them
for their Sunday School examination, which, indeed, she did with
embellishments and in their own poetic and metaphorical fashion. The