them with the blood and flesh of some luckless engineer. Through the cloud of smoke Tanaka could see that some fell in the holes, others were hit. Now it was the actual bridgehead, thirty yards of water, how deep, how shallow, who could say! All that they could see were the bayonets of the opposing Russians. They were almost down to the water's edge. Tanaka was the first at the actual bridge-head; what had happened to his captain he did not know, what had happened to the colonel mattered not to him; with one shout of "Banzai! he leapt into the water, and all that he realised was that the men were leaping in beside him. For a moment it was waist-deep, then it was kneedeep, and now they are on the dry land. Of the next five minutes who shall speak accurately? All that Tanaka knew was that the sword-blade, which had been in his family for four hundred years, clashed roughly against a bayonet, and was then fleshed true and hard. Then the impetus from the slope above bore him and his companions back, but they made a stand at the water's edge, and that stand was sufficient to save the bridge-head. Company after company came splashing through the water, and then the Russians were taking the steel in the back. It was a horrible mêlée; and when Tanaka really came to his senses, he was trying to form up his company amid the smoking guns of a captured Russian battery, while a corporal, chattering with excite

ment, was binding up his arm with а first field dressing. Until this moment Tanaka did not even know that he had been wounded.

There was no paper printed in Japanese which did not ring with the heroism of Lieutenant Tanaka of the Guards. There was hardly a shop-window in Tokyo which had not a coloured picture detailing the Lieutenant's heroism at the passage of the Yalu. For the moment there was no more honoured name in all Japan. There was no woman in all the many islands, which comprise the Far Eastern Empire, prouder than the little white-skinned Geisha, Teru San. Now her self-sacrifice seemed as nothing. Whatever it may have cost, she had enabled her lover, not only to win his ambition, but also to place himself in the history of his country.

She had been making her toilet since four in the afternoon, for that very day Tanaka, the wounded hero, had returned to Tokyo. Even as she sat, rubbing the powder on her cheeks, she could hear the shouts of the crowd which were according him a public welcome. It was meet that she should look her best, for to-day was to be the greatest day in her life.

The telephone bell rang. Anxiously she waited for the message. Surely it could not be him; it was too soon; he had not yet had time to think of her. She was right—it was only a message from the big rich American who, for the

last two months, had been lavishing his attentions upon her, and who was now reduced to such a state that he had offered to ransom her at whatever price her master might name, if only she would consent to marry him and return with him to the States. A foreigner forsooth! And Teru San told the maid to tell the foreigner that she was ill, that she was out of business for an indefinite period until she should be again convalescent. She

then sat quietly in her room and waited: it was possibly the happiest expectation in the whole of her strange and chequered life.

But her hero never came, even though she waited until the small hours of the morning. "He is in the hospital," she said to herself; "I shall hear from him to-morrow.' But the morrow brought no message, and so it went on from day to day, from week to week, until it was announced in the 'Kokomin Shimbun' that the hero Tanaka, decorated by the Emperor, and now employed on the General Staff, was betrothed to the daughter of Count Inouye.

And so it comes about that Teru San may be the mother of American citizens.

THE Vrouw Grobelaar, you must know, is a lady of excellent standing, as much by reason of family connections (for she was a Viljoen of the older stock herself, and buried in her time three husbands of estimable parentage) as of her wealth. Her farms extended from the Ringkop on the one side to the Holgaatspruit on the other, which is more than a day's ride; and her stock appears to be of that ideal species which does not take rinderpest. Her Kaffirs were born on the place, and will surely die there, for though the old lady is firmly convinced that she rules them with a rod of iron, the truth

VOL. CLXXVI.—NO. MLXVI.

is she spoils them atrociously; and were it not that there is an excellent headman to her kraals, the niggers would soon grow pot-bellied in idleness.

The Vrouw Grobelaar is a lady who commands respect. Her face is a portentous mask of solemnity, and her figure is spacious beyond the average of Dutch ladies, so that certain chairs are tacitly conceded her as a monopoly. The good Vrouw does not read or write, and having never found a need in herself for these arts, is the least thing impatient of those who practise them. The Psalms, however, she appears to know by heart; also other portions of the Bible; and is capable of

K

spitting Scripture at you on the smallest provocation. Indeed she bubbles with morality, and a mention of "the accursed thing" (which would appear to be a genus and not a species, so many articles of human commerce does it embrace) will set her effervescing with mingled blame and exhortation. But if punishment should come in question, as when a Kaffir waylaid and slew a chicken of hers, she displays so prolific an invention in excuses, so generous a partiality for mercy, that not the most irate induna that ever laid down a law of his own could find a pretext for using the stick.

She lives in her homestead with some half-dozen of nieces, a nephew or two, and a litter of grandchildren, who know the old lady to the core, cozen and blarney her as they please, and love her with a perfect unanimity. I think she sometimes blames herself for her tyrannical usage of these innocents, who nevertheless thrive remarkably on it. You can hardly get off your horse at the door without maiming an infant, and you can't throw a stone in any direction without killing a marriageable damsel. They pervade the old place like an atmosphere; the kraals ring with their voices, and the Kaffirs spend lives of mingled misery and delight at their irresponsible hands.

I do not think I need particularise in the matter of these youngsters, save as regards Katje. Katje refuses to be ignored, and she was no more to be overlooked than a tin-tack

in the sole of your foot. She was the only child of Vrouw Grobelaar's youngest brother, Barend Viljoen, who died while lion hunting in the Fever Country. At the time I am thinking of Katje might have been eighteen. She was like a poppy among the stubble, so delicate in her bodily fabric, and yet so opulent in shape and colouring. She was the nicest child that ever gave a kiss for the asking (you could kiss her as soon as look at her), but she was also the very devil to deal with if she saw fit to take a distaste of you. I saw her once smack a fathom of able-bodied youth on both sides of the head with a lusty vigour that constrained the sufferer to howl. And I have seen her come to meet a man-well, me-with the readiest lips and the friendliest hand in the world. Oh, Katje was like a blotch of colour in one's life; something vivid, to throw the days into relief.

A stranger to the household might have put down Katje's behaviour towards the Vrouw Grobelaar as damnable, no less; and in the early days of my acquaintance with the family I was somewhat tempted to this opinion myself. For she not only flouted the old lady to her face, but would upon occasion disregard her utterly, and do it all with what I can only call a swagger that seemed to demand a local application of drastic measures. But Katje knew her victim, if such a word can be applied to the Vrouw Grobelaar, and never prodded her save on her armour. For instance, to

say the Kaffirs were over-driven and starved was nothing if not flattery to say they were spoiled and coddled would have been mere brutality.

With it all, the Vrouw Grobelaar went her placid way, like an elephant over eggshells. Her household did her one service, at least, in return for their maintenance, and that was to provide the old lady with an audience. It was in no sense an unwilling service, for her imagination ran to the gruesome, and she never planted a precept but she drove it home with a case in point. As a result night was often shattered by a yell from some sleeper whose dreams had trespassed on devilish domains. The Vrouw Grobelaar believed most entirely in Kaffir magic, in witchcraft and second sight, in ghosts and infernal possession, in destiny, and in a very personal arch-fiend, who presided over a material hell when not abroad in the world on the war-path. Besides, she had stores of tales from the lives of neighbours and acquaintances: often horrible enough, for the Boers are a lonely folk and God's finger writes large in their lives.

I almost think I can see it now-the low Dutch kitchen with its plank ceiling, the old lady in her chair, with an illustrative forefinger uplifted to punctuate the periods of her tale, the embers, white and red, glowing on the hearth, and the intent, shadow-pitted faces of the hearers, agape for horrors.

There was a tale I heard her tell to Katje, when that damsel

had seen fit to observe, apropos of disobedience in general, that her grandfather's character had nothing to do with hers. The tale was in plaintive Dutch, the language that makes or breaks a story-teller, for you must hang your point on the gutturals or you miss it altogether.

"Look at my husband's uncle," said the old lady. "A sinful man, for ever swearing and cursing, and drinking. His farm was the worst in the district ; the very Kaffirs were ashamed of it when they went to visit the kraals. But Voss (that was the name of my husband's uncle) cared nothing so long as there was a horse to ride into the dorp on and some money to buy whisky with. And he drank so much and carried on so wickedly that his wife died and his girls married poor men and never went to stay with their father. So at last he lived in the house, with only his son to help him from being all alone.

of a

"This son was Barend Voss, a great hulking fellow, with the strength of a trek-ox, and never a word of good or bad to throw away on any one. But his face was the face violent man. He had blue eyes with no pleasantness about them, but a sort of glitter, as though there were live coals in his brain. He did not drink like his father; and these two would sit together in the evenings, the one bleared and stupid with liquor, and the other watching him in silence across the table. They spoke seldom to one another; and it would