“Soh! Well, now jes’ cock yer ear, and hearken to the voice of the sea—rising and falling, soft and melancholy. Dying away to a whisper, then swellin’ up as the big wave rolls in, swinging to and fro in a great song of quiet and peace. That’s music, sonny; and when the wind rises, and in the dark of the night, the spring-tide, coming in with the power of the sea behind, thunders on the beach, there’s music there—wild and grand—and when the clouds pile up outer the sea higher and higher, and the yearth waitin’ in silence, when there is no breath of air, shakes to the rollin’ crash of the thunder—there’s music then. Where’s your potery beside them sounds and the lightning flash and the rush of the wind, and the splashing of water risin’ suddenly?”
I thrust my paper back into my pocket.
“There’s music, sonny, in the veld and bush, and in the night cries of the wild animiles and birds; but I yeard onct a sound I shall never forget, and I guess there was in it a whole book of potery. But you ain’t finished about your podder.”
“Never mind the frog, the snake has swallowed him by this. Tell me the story.”
“Well it were in the Borna Pass, time of the Kaffir War, and the ole 94th were halted in the jaws of the pass, waitin’ for the cool of the afternoon before they marched. I recomember it well—the dark woods in the narrow pass rising up till they ’most shut out the sky; the red-coats down by the water; the smoke rising in tall columns from the cooking fires; the horses standing in a bunch switching the flies offen ’em; the oxen knee-deep in the water; and a silence born of the hot sun over all. It were as quiet as Sunday down in the mouth of the pass, with the sun running up and down the bayonets like fire, and no red to stain them, for there was no news of Kaffirs within a day’s march.
“I yeard a honey-bird call outer the black of the wood, and I jes’ moved off with nothin’ mor’n a pipe and a clasp-knife.
“‘Where you going, Abe?’ said a little bugler chap, lookin’ up from the shade of a bush.
“‘Bee huntin’, sonny.’
“‘I’ll come along o’ you,’ he sed; ‘as there ain’t no bloomin’ Kafs to hunt, bees’ll do.’
“He were a little chap, with his lips all cracked by the sun, and a little nose that you couldn’t see for the freckles, and brown eyes like you see in a bird or a buck—clear and bright. Always he were on the move, like a willey-wagtail, and him and me were chums. Ah yes; many a story I tole him by the camp fire, him a sitting with his chin in his hands staring at me with his big round eyes, and they called him ‘Abe’s kid,’ ’cos I downed a fellow for boosting him with a leather belt. I tole you how a little dream lad had come to me one night outer the sea; that were he, my son—that were my little boy.”