"Well, isn't it? I should say it's the very spot. Now, just look: here we are in an open plain, where a bird can squat down in the sand and look around for twenty miles--if she can see so far--in every direction, and see danger coming, whether it's a man, a lion, or a jackal, and shuffle off her nest, and make tracks long before whatever it is gets near enough to make out where she rose. Of course I don't know whether we shall find the nest, if there is one. It's hard enough to find a lark's or a partridge's nest at home in an open field of forty or fifty acres; so of course, big though the nest is, and the bird, it's a deal harder, out in a field hundreds of miles square, eh?" "Of course it is." "'Scuse my not looking round at you when I'm speaking, old chap; but if I take my eye off the spot, I shall never find it again." "I say, don't be so jolly particular, Joe," cried Dyke, laughing. "Why not? It's just what you and I ought to be," said the big fellow with simple earnestness. "We're out here in a savage land, but we don't want to grow into savages, nor yet to be as blunt and gruff as two bears. I'm not going to forget that the dear old governor at home is a gentleman, even if his sons do rough it out here." "Till they're regular ruffians, Joe.--I say: see the nest?" "Oh no; it's a mile away yet." "Then there isn't one. You couldn't have seen it at all that distance." "I never said I could see the nest, did I? It was enough for me that I've seen the birds about, and that I caught sight of that one making off this morning. We call them stupid, and they are in some things; but they're precious cunning in others." "But if they were only feeding?" "Why, then, there's no nest. But I say breeding, and not feeding; and that's rhyme if you take it in time, as the old woman said." "But you talked about hen birds. Then there may be more than one nest?" "Not here. Why, you know how a lot of them lay in the same nest." "At home, shut up in pens, but not on the veldt." "Why, of course they do, and 'tis their nature to, like the bears and lions in Dr Watts. You don't know everything quite yet, old chap. If you took the glass, and came and lay out here for two or three days and nights, and always supposing the birds didn't see you--because if they did they'd be deserting the nest and go somewhere else--you'd see first one hen come to lay and then another, perhaps six of them; and when they'd packed the nest as full as it would hold, with the sand banked up round the eggs to keep them tight in their places with the points downwards, so as to be close, you'd see hen after hen come and take her turn, sitting all day, while the cock bird comes at nights and takes his turn, because he's bigger and stronger, and better able to pitch into the prowling jackals." "How did you know all this, Joe?"