On the thirteenth morning, therefore, she sat beneath the verandah of the house, reading in the book according to her custom, and I went about my work making food ready.

Suddenly I heard a tumult, and looking over the wall which is round the garden and to the left of the house, I saw a great number of men, some of them white, some Arab, and some half-breeds, one mounted and the others on foot, and behind them a long caravan of slaves with the slave-sticks set upon their necks.
"As they came these men fired guns at the people of the Settlement, who ran this way and that.

Some of the people fell, and more were made captive, but others of them got away, for they were at work in the fields and had seen the slave-traders coming.
"Now, as I gazed affrighted, I saw my mistress, the Shepherdess, flying towards the wall behind which I stood, the book she was reading being still in her hand.

But as she reached it, the man mounted on the mule overtook her, and she turned about and faced him, setting her back against the wall.

Then I crouched down and hid myself among some banana-trees, and watched what passed through a crack in the wall.
"The man on the mule was old and fat, his hair was white and his face yellow and wrinkled.