Child, put down that gun.

Do you want to shoot your mother?
Have I not told you that you must never touch a gun ?" and he pointed to Suzanne, who had picked up her father's _roer_--for in those days, when we lived among so many Kaffirs, every man went armed--and was playing at soldiers with it.
"I was shooting buck and Kaffirs, papa," she said, obeying him with a pout.
"Shooting Kaffirs, were you?
Well, there will be a good deal of that to do before all is finished in this land, little one.

But it is not work for girls; you should have been a boy, Suzanne." "I can't; I am a girl," she answered; "and I haven't any brothers like other girls.

Why haven't I any brothers ?" Jan shrugged his shoulders, and looked at me.
"Won't the sea bring me a brother ?" went on the child, for she had been told that little children came out of the sea.
"Perhaps, if you look for one very hard," I answered with a sigh, little knowing what fruit would spring from this seed of a child's talk.
On the morrow there was a great to do about the place, for the black girl whose business it was to look after Suzanne came in at breakfast time and said that she had lost the child.

It seemed that they had gone down to the shore in the early morning to gather big shells such as are washed up there after a heavy storm, and that Suzanne had taken with her a bag made of spring-buck hide in which to carry them.