As the girls' voices rose, half sobbingly, in the old familiar air, beloved of every English-speaking person, tears fairly ran down their fair but sad young faces, and I could not help being struck with the pathos of the scene.
But all things considered, these were really happy days for all of us, at any rate in comparison with those we had previously experienced.

We had by this time quite an orchestra of reed flutes and the fiddles aforesaid, whose strings were of gut procured from the native wild-cat--a very little fellow, by the way, about the size of a fair-sized rat; I found him everywhere.

These cats were great thieves, and only roamed about at night.

I trapped them in great numbers by means of an ingenious native arrangement of pointed sticks of wood, which, while providing an easy entrance, yet confronted the outgoing cat with a formidable _chevaux-de- frise_.

The bait I used was meat in an almost putrid condition.
I could not handle the prisoners in the morning, because they scratched and bit quite savagely; I therefore forked them out with a spear.