No, no, Captain Niel, I would not ask you to take a share in this place if I wasn't sure that it would remain under the British flag.

But we will talk of all this another time, and now come in to breakfast." [*] A fact .-- Author.
After breakfast, as John was far too lame to walk about the farm, the fair Bessie suggested that he should come and help her to wash a batch of ostrich feathers, and, accordingly, off he went.

The _locus operandi_ was in a space of lawn at the rear of a little clump of _naatche_ orange-trees, of which the fruit is like that of the Maltese orange, only larger.

Here were placed an ordinary washing-tub half-filled with warm water, and a tin bath full of cold.

The ostrich feathers, many of which were completely coated with red dirt, were plunged first into the tub of warm water, where John Niel scrubbed them with soap, and then transferred to the tin bath, where Bessie rinsed them and laid them on a sheet in the sun to dry.