there was no sun, for a grey haze hung like a veil beneath the arch of the
sky, so dense and thick that its rays were cut off from the earth which
lay below silent and stifled. Tom, the Kaffir driver, had told her that a
storm was coming, a father of storms, which would end the great drought.
Therefore he had gone to a kloof in the mountains where the oxen were in
charge of the other two native boys--since on this upland there was no
pasturage to drive them back to the waggon. For, as he explained to her,
in such tempests cattle are apt to take fright and rush away for miles,
and without cattle their plight would be even worse than it was at
present.

At least this was what Tom said, but Rachel, who had been brought up among
natives and understood their mind, knew that his real reason was that he
wished to be out of the way when the baby was buried. Kaffirs do not like
death, unless it comes by the assegai in war, and Tom, a good creature,
had been fond of that baby during its short little life. Well, it was
buried now; he had finished digging its resting-place in the hard soil
before he went. Rachel, poor child, for she was but fifteen, had borne it
to its last bed, and her father had unpacked his surplice from a box, put
it on and read the Burial Service over the grave. Afterwards together they
had filled in that dry, red earth, and rolled stones on to it, and as
there were few flowers at this season of the year, placed a shrivelled
branch or two of mimosa upon the stones--the best offering they had to
make.

Rachel and her father were the sole mourners at this funeral, if we may
omit two rock rabbits that sat upon a shelf of stone in a neighbouring
cliff, and an old baboon which peered at these strange proceedings from
its crest, and finally pushed down a boulder before it departed, barking
indignantly. Her mother could not come because she was ill with grief and