"Oh, dear sor, oh, kind sor, don't spake disrespectfully of the Ould Gentleman; shure he's been here, and has just left. Oh, sor; I'll repent, I will. For God's sake send for the holy father. What will I do? What will I do?" We got him to his quarters at last, and next morning Mike was a changed man. Although still by nature cross-grained, yet a more respectful servant or a better comrade could not be found on a month's trek, and he stayed with me till he died, two years afterwards, regretted by everyone who knew him. _R.I.P._ CHAPTER VI BUSHED In very many parts of the world, which on the map are painted red and collectively called the British Empire, there are huge tracts of country covered with forests of all sorts, which are known to the inhabitants of the different colonies by various names, and these have exacted a heavy toll of human life from the venturesome traveller, prospector, hunter, or others, who have entered their recesses on their own business or pleasure. If the scrub of Australia, the bush of New Zealand, the forests of Canada, and the wilds of Africa could only be examined with a microscope, the remains of thousands of men would be discovered who, having been bushed (_i.e._ lost in the forest), have died of hunger, thirst or exhaustion, and whose remains, unfound, have wasted away until only a few mouldering bones, some tattered rags, and a few fragments of rusty metal remain to tell the tale and act as a warning to others. I have on two occasions been the finder of the remains of men who have been lost. One on the Taupo plains, who disappeared and who, although he was missed and looked for, was not found until three years after his disappearance, when I, quite by chance, stumbled on the poor chap's bones, which were identified by a glass eye. The other case was the bones of a white man I found while shooting in South Africa. Who or what he had been never transpired. That he had been a white man was evident, but when or how he had been lost I never found out. I remember well that after I had searched the vicinity for anything that could have been used as a clue to his identity, I stood over the poor bones and moralised. This poor chap must have belonged to someone in the world who cared for him. Yet here he lay nameless, and unknown, his bones to be buried, as soon as my hunting boys with knife and tomahawk could scoop out a hole, by a man who was a perfect stranger to him, or, for all I knew to the contrary, we might have been comrades in two or three wars, or have hobnobbed together scores of times. However, there, under a tree, his bones lie, and I have no doubt that all marks of his grave, even the cross I cut out on the tree, to mark the spot, have long ago disappeared, and yet it is quite possible to this day there are people hoping and wondering if he will turn up. In the colonies men disappear very rapidly, and they are not readily missed. So they do in this great wilderness,