It is the wisest-looking little thing you can imagine, is this meercat of South Africa. Its keen, restless black eye looks right into your own, and asks questions as plainly almost as speech could do. It has a way of setting itself up bolt-upright, and turning its head from one object to another with the most inquisitive air, and adapts itself to the habits of its owners in a manner perfectly marvellous. I remember one which, though not very young when taken near the Orange River, became domesticated like a dog, and was far more sociable than a cat. I think I see it now, sitting at a garden-gate facing a parade-ground, on which, at stated hours of the day, troops were wont to exercise. As the warning bugle sounded, it took up its position; when the regiment fell in, the meercat placed itself in front of the line; when the men marched, the little beast advanced in front of the column, halted with the troops, and when they were again in line, sat down before them, and watched the commanding officer with a knowing air quite indescribable. At the close of a drill it would head the band to the limits of the ground; and when all were dismissed, would return to the house. In the cold weather, if suspicious of any visitors, it would roll itself into a ball, and squeeze itself into some corner, where it could not easily be reached; but it loved best to sit before the fire, with its paws on the fender, surveying the family group, of which it was the pet, with its sharp twinkling eyes, and bending its ears knowingly to every unaccustomed sound. Such too was the creature that trotted beside Amayeka, now and then seating itself before her, and glancing from its mistress to the nymphs in the river, as if to remind her she was called; but she went on, deaf to the cry "Izapa;" and Gray watched her till she disappeared behind a tuft of trees overhanging the upper drift. Soon afterwards Lee joined some young warriors, with whom he had been engaged all the morning in firing at a mark, and who now summoned him to their employment of casting bullets at a fire under the rocks; Gray rose also, and descended by the bank. Amayeka was seated by the river's brink, with the meercat at her feet; twilight lingered long, and the young moon shed its first ray of silver on the water, when a loose stone rolled past her; there was a light tread, a rustle in the branches of a long-tressed weeping willow, and Gray's hand fell on her shoulder. But in a copse above lay the wizard Amani, with his elements of witchcraft gathered round him--strips of skin from the golden back of the deadly puff-adder, the hood of a cobra capello, some poisonous roots steeped in gall, the forefinger of a dead Fingo herdsman, and the skull of a Hottentot, in which last he was busily mixing up these ghastly charms with a cement of blood and clay.