CHAPTER ONE.
HOME, SWEET HOME.
"Hi! Val! Come, quick!" "What's the matter ?" I said excitedly, for my brother Bob came tearing down to the enclosure, sending the long-legged young ostriches scampering away towards the other side; and I knew directly that something unusual must be on the way, or, after the warnings he had received about not startling the wild young coveys, he would not have dashed up like that.
"I dunno.

Father sent me to fetch you while he got the guns ready.

He said something about mounted men on the other side of the kopje, so it can't be Kaffirs.

I say, do back me up, Val, and get father to let me have a gun." "Ugh! you bloodthirsty young wretch!" I cried as I started with him for our place, now partly hidden by the orchard--apple and pear trees--I had helped to plant seven years before, when father really pitched his tent by the kopje, and he, Bob--a little, round-headed tot of a fellow then-- Aunt Jenny, and I lived in the canvas construction till we had built a house of stone.
The orchard was planted long before the tent was given up--all trees that father had ordered to be sent to us from a famous nursery in Hertfordshire.

How well I remember it all!--the arrival of the four big bundles wrapped in matting, and tied behind a great Cape wagon drawn by twenty oxen, whose foreloper was a big, shiny black fellow, who wore a tremendous straw hat, and seemed to think that was all he needed in the way of clothes, as it was big enough to keep off the sun (of which there was a great deal) and the rain (of which there was little).