“If you continue as you have begun, Lionel, you will soon be able to accompany me on my journeys, and make yourself very useful in a variety of ways,” he said.
“Then I’ll make great haste,” answered Lionel. “I’ll go with you as soon as you will take me, and learn how to shoot lions and elephants, and Zulus too, if they try to treat us as they did the people in Mangaleesu’s kraal.”
Lionel had still need of further religious instruction, as his last remark showed, and good Mistress Jansen endeavoured to give it by teaching him “to love our enemies, to bless them that curse us, to do good to them that hate us, and to pray for them which despitefully use and persecute us.”
Chapter Four.
A journey northward.
What the camel is in Northern Africa—the ship of the desert—so may be considered the waggon in the southern part of the dark continent. It may be likened indeed to a huge, deeply laden merchantman, steadily making her way amid the rolling waves of the ocean.
Some time had passed, not reckoned by months only, but by years, since the events narrated in the previous chapters occurred, when one of those lumbering vehicles, dragged by a span of fourteen sturdy oxen, was rolling along through the eastern part of Natal towards the Zulu border.
A short distance ahead rode our old friend Hendricks the hunter, scarcely changed since we first knew him, except that his beard might have become slightly more grizzled, and that here and there a wrinkle had deepened on his open countenance. Occasionally a shade of melancholy passed over it, as he spoke to a companion who rode at his side on a light, active little horse.