In the matter of shooting I am, perhaps, like the reformed rake who coined virtue out of inability further to sin. Nevertheless, I could no longer take pleasure in slaughtering the few of Nature's lovely wild creatures that survive our cruelly scientific machines of precision. It is true my eyesight is not quite what it was. To what extent this circumstance should be reckoned as a factor towards my abstention, I will not attempt to say. We shall soon be old, you and I; in fact it is almost stretching a point to call ourselves still only middle-aged. We are just a couple of ineffective veterans who can only draw comfort from the bank of our experiences. _Aber "wir haben geloebt und geliebet_." Good-bye, Hendrick. No more will your keen and faithful eyes hold my vagrant spoor over sand and kanya. No more shall I see your bullet-shaped, pepper-corned head with its oblique eyes and gleaming teeth arising unexpectedly from among the tussocks. For all I know you may have saved me from a dreadful death. I can recall at least one occasion on which I was positively sure you were wrong in your idea as to the direction in which the camp lay,--yet the event proved you to be right. Had I then been alone, my bones might now be lying white in the heart of Bushmanland. And you, Typhon,--I suppose you have awakened to wrath--that your hunched shoulders have heaved many times since that day on which my awed eyes beheld your russet mane flung streaming southward on the tempest,-- I suppose your impotent tentacles still strive to gather up the plains into their blighting grip. Sometimes, when the firmament is very clear and the fingers of the wind stray gently through the tresses of the night, I lift my eyes to the familiar stars and realise that again the sky has gathered the throbbing desert to its breast and covered Bushmanland with the folds of its purple mantle. It is then I unlock my storehouse of dreams and live once more through vanished days of strenuous effort and nights of wonderful mystery. The End. End of Project Gutenberg's Lodges in the Wilderness, by William Charles Scully