“I fired, and my tusker dropped. But the terrible noise and trumpeting must have shaken Friday’s nerves a bit. He was usually a good shot, but on this occasion he missed. I loaded at once again, and as the great brute came down on us, let him have it point-blank. He reeled, but still came on. I felt rooted to the spot. My life in a moment more, I thought, would be crushed out of me. Ah! but there must have been a mist of blood before the tusker’s eyes; it was a tree he charged; his tusk snapped like a pipe-stalk, and the great elephant at once fell dead.”
“It was a narrow escape.”
“Well, it was, but for the matter of that, Nie, who knows but that our lives may be ever in danger, no matter where we are. A hundred times a day, perhaps, we are upheld by the kind hands of an unseen Providence, ‘our eyes are kept from tears, and our feet from falling.’
“Should we be grateful when our lives are spared? I think so, Nie, lad; only the reckless, and the braggart, and too often the coward, boast of the dangers they have come through, just as if their own strength alone had saved them.”
Chapter Eleven.
“They are all, the meanest things that be.
As free to live, and to enjoy that life,
As God was free to form them at the first,
Who in His sovereign wisdom made them all.”
Cowper.
