"Hang the forests!" exclaimed the bushman, "don't let them stop your measuring, if you want to measure. But I can't see the good of your getting at the length and breadth of the earth? Who will be any better off when every thing is reduced to feet and inches? I should just like to think of the globe as infinite; to measure it is to make it small. No, Sir John, if I were to live for ever, I could never understand the use of your operations." Sir John could not help smiling. They had often debated the subject, and the ignorant child of nature could evidently not enter into the interest attached to the survey. Whenever Sir John attempted to convince him, he answered eloquently with arguments stamped with a genuine naturalness, of which Sir John, half-_savant_ and half-hunter, could fully appreciate the charm. Thus conversing, the hunters pursued the rock-hares, the shrill-toned plovers, the partridges (with brown, yellow, and black plumage), and other small game. But Sir John had all the sport to himself. The bushman seldom fired; he was pre-occupied. The quarrel between the two astronomers seemed to trouble him more than it did his companion, and the variety of game hardly attracted his notice. In truth there was an idea floating through his brain, which, little by little, took more definite form. Sir John heard him talking to himself, and watched him as he quietly let the game pass by, as engrossed as Palander himself. Two or three times in the course of the day he drew near Sir John and said,-- "So you really think that Colonel Everest and Mr. Strux will not come to terms?" Sir John invariably replied that agreement seemed unlikely, and that he feared there would be a separation between Englishmen and Russians. The last time Mokoum received this answer he added,-- "Well, you may be easy; I have found a means to satisfy both the chiefs. Before to-morrow, if the wind is favourable, they will have nothing to quarrel about." "What do you mean to do, Mokoum?" "Never mind, Sir John." "Very well, I will leave it to you. You deserve to have your name preserved in the annals of science." "That would be too great an honour for me, Sir John," answered the bushman, and then continued silently to ponder over his project. Sir John made no further inquiries, but could not at all guess how the bushman proposed to re-unite the two adversaries.