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“Gold-mining!” he broke in; “ah! yes, I once went gold-mining at Pilgrims’ Rest in the Transvaal, and it was after that that we had the business about Jim-Jim and the lions. Do you know Pilgrim’s Rest? Well, it is, or was, one of the queerest little places you ever saw. The town itself was pitched in a stony valley, with mountains all about it, and in the middle of such scenery as one does not often get the chance of seeing. Many and many is the time that I have thrown down my pick and shovel in disgust, clambered out of my claim, and walked a couple of miles or so to the top of some hill. Then I would lie down in the grass and look out over the glorious stretch of country–the smiling valleys, the great mountains touched with gold–real gold of the sunset, and clothed in sweeping robes of bush, and stare into the depths of the perfect sky above; yes, and thank Heaven I had got away from the cursing and the coarse jokes of the miners, and the voices of those Basutu Kaffirs as they toiled in the sun, the memory of which is with me yet.

“Well, for some months I dug away patiently at my claim, till the very sight of a pick or of a washing-trough became hateful to me. A hundred times a day I lamented my own folly in having invested eight hundred pounds, which was about all that I was worth at the time, in this gold-mining. But like other better people before me, I had been bitten by the gold bug, and now was forced to take the consequences. I bought a claim out of which a man had made a fortune–five or six thousand pounds at least–as I thought, very cheap; that is, I gave him five hundred pounds down for it. It was all that I had made by a very rough year’s elephant-hunting beyond the Zambesi, and I sighed deeply and prophetically when I saw my successful friend, who was a Yankee, sweep up the roll of Standard Bank notes with the lordly air of the man who has made his fortune, and cram them into his breeches pockets. ‘Well,’ I said to him–the happy vendor–‘it is a magnificent property, and I only hope that my luck will be as good as yours has been.’

“He smiled; to my excited nerves it seemed that he smiled ominously, as he answered me in a peculiar Yankee drawl: ‘I guess, stranger, as I ain’t the one to make a man quarrel with his food, more especial when there ain’t no more going of the rounds; and as for that there claim, well, she’s been a good nigger to me; but between you and me, stranger, speaking man to man, now that there ain’t any filthy lucre between us to obscure the features of the truth, I guess she’s about worked out!’

“I gasped; the fellow’s effrontery took the breath out of me. Only five minutes before he had been swearing by all his gods–and they appeared to be numerous and mixed–that there were half a dozen fortunes left in the claim, and that he was only giving it up because he was downright weary of shovelling the gold out.

“‘Don’t look so vexed, stranger,’ went on my tormentor, ‘perhaps there is some shine in the old girl yet; anyway you are a downright good fellow, you are, therefore you will, I guess, have a real A1 opportunity of working on the feelings of Fortune. Anyway it will bring the muscle up upon your arm, for the stuff is uncommon stiff, and, what is more, you will in the course of a year earn a sight more than two thousand dollars in value of experience.’

“Then he went just in time, for in another moment I should have gone for him, and I saw his face no more.