Of Healdtown and Lovedale,--a much larger Kafir school,--I will speak in the next chapter, which shall be exclusively educational. Near to Lovedale is the little town of Alice in which I stayed two days with the hospitable doctor. He took me out for a day’s hunting as it is called, which in that benighted country means shooting. I must own here to have made a little blunder. When I was asked some days previously whether I would like to have a day’s hunting got up for me in the neighbourhood of Alice, I answered with alacrity in the affirmative. Hunting, which is the easiest of all sports, has ever been an allurement to me. To hunt, as we hunt at home, it is only necessary that a man should stick on to the back of a horse,--or, failing that, that he should fall off. When hunting was offered to me I thought that I could at any rate go out and see. But on my arrival at Alice I found that hunting meant--shooting, an exercise of skill in which I had never even tried to prevail. “I haven’t fired off a gun,” I said, “for forty years.” But I had agreed to go out hunting, and word had passed about the country, and a hundred naked Kafirs were to be congregated to drive the game. I tried hard to escape. “Might I not be allowed to go and see the naked Kafirs, without a gun,--especially as it was so probable that I might shoot one of them if I were armed?” But this would not do. I was told that the Kafirs would despise me. So I took the gun and carried it ever so many miles, on horseback, to my very great annoyance. At a certain spot on a hill side,--where the hill downwards was covered with bush and shrubs, we met the naked Kafirs. There were a hundred of them, I was told, more or less, and they were as naked as my heart could desire,--but each carrying some fragment of a blanket wound round on his arm, and many of them were decorated with bracelets and earrings. There were some preliminary ceremonies, such as the lying down of a young Kafir and the pretence of all the men around him,--and of all the dogs, of which there was a large muster,--that the prostrate figure was a dead buck over whom it was necessary to lick their lips and shake their weapons;--and after this the Kafirs went down into the bush. Then I was led away by my white friend, carrying my gun and leading my horse, and after a while was told that the very spot had been found. If I would remain there with my gun cocked and ready, a buck would surely come by almost at once so that I might shoot him. I did as I was bid, and sat alert for thirty minutes holding my gun as though something to be shot would surely come every second. But nothing came and I gradually went to sleep.