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herself a lucky woman when she related the facts to that same listener. She knew when the girls got into trouble, as they sometimes did, and who was the responsible party, and what was the best course to take in the delicate operation of bringing the delinquent to book. But whatever she knew the poor cripple knew also, for on that understanding alone would she accept a confidence. ‘You can speak out,’ she would say, when her visitor showed a delicacy in beginning, ‘because I shall tell him when you are gone, whether or no.’

He made a splendid wreck, this husband of hers, as he sat there day after day, dead up to the eyes, but alive from that point upwards. She had been told that when the light dimmed in his eyes then he would die; so she watched him hour by hour, week in week out, instilling, perhaps, some of her own superabundant vitality into the dying flame. She was a tall, strong woman, yet not so very long ago that poor cripple was in the habit of taking her up in his arms like an infant, and holding her there till a hearty tug at his hair effected her release. But there came a black and treacherous day when wife and children looked for him in vain as the twilight fell. Struck by a flying branch, he lay in the shadow of the woods that should never again have cause to tremble at his tread. That was the first tragedy of the settlement, and nothing of all the subsequent happenings had made such a strong and abiding impression on the minds of the settlers.

Every bushman knows the toll of blood demanded by the virgin forest. It is fixed and inexorable, and though skill in bushcraft will carry a man far in the