[Illustration: Grandolphus Africanus.]
Now to dinner! On what? Yah! tough beef, woolly mutton and stringy
chicken. And to think that but for the Boers, the beastly Boers,
we should have had the finest teal, wild duck, venison, goslings,
asparagus, French beans, best Welsh mutton, and real turtle soup every
day _au choix_!! But what did the Boers do? Why, they ascertained that
skins and feathers, and shells, were valuable, whereupon they went to
work, shot everything everywhere, sold skins and feathers, and shells!
So that deer and birds hadn't a chance. If they popped out, pop went
the guns like the original weasel, which some years ago was always
popping, and the poor dumb animals with the pleading eyes and the
tender flesh were slaughtered wholesale. In this manner, too, the game
soon came to an end, as it must do whenever the game is so one-sided
as it was here. Then, as I have said, the shells were valuable! The
shells! What chance had the tortoise and the turtle? "'Tis the voice
of the turtle, I heard him complain." (What's that from? That's from
WATTS--eh?) What chance had the peas, however wild? or a bean as broad
as one of ----'s after-dinner stories? Ah! it makes me sad and angry,
and once again I cry Oh, for an hour, and that the dinner-hour, aboard
the _Grantully Castle_! Ay! even though the G.O.M. were on board; for
he could appreciate the daily Currie which to me is now _perdu_. Well!
so to dinner "with what appetite I may," and then on to Pretoria,
of which place I think I shall change the name to Pre-radicallia or
Pre-fourthpartia. You see Pre-toria implies one who was Toryer than
a Tory. Aha! what is my scheme? Do you see the picture? GRANDOLPHUS
IMPERATOR REX AURIFERORUM MEORUM (Latiné for "Mines") surrounded by
his Pretorian Guards.
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