Of course I simply had to do it--they were too snug and dry and warm, and I was too wet and cold, to allow of any other course of action! So I just snicked the guy-ropes slightly in a weak spot and hurried back and turned in again in my wet blankets, hoping for the best. It came soon--a muffled squelch--followed by a perfect bedlam of polyglot profanity. I heard someone get mixed up with the pots and buckets and make disparaging remarks about them; I heard another’s periods cut short by a sound impossible to write, but that conveyed a pleasant picture of an attempt to get rid of a full mouthful of sand--in fact, though I could see nothing, I could hear enough to conjure up a vivid picture of what was happening under that extremely wet and extremely heavy bucksail. At length they struggled out, as I could visualise by the storm of recrimination and accusations. “You donder!” I heard Du Toit snort (I found later his nose was badly bashed by a bucket). “I knew you didn’t tie the _verdomte touw_ properly!” “Oh, blazes!” retorted Jim’s voice, “here’s a slab-sided son of a zand-trapper, that don’t know a rope from a reim, trying to tell a sailor-man how to tie knots. H----! Why, you snored the blamed thing down! Where’s your partner anyway? Asleep, I s’pose, under all that. Well! what did I say about sleeping-sickness?” They then appeared to search for me; and then one of the incoherent gentlemen made a remark to Jim. “So he did,” I heard him agree; “cleared out when we were talking. I’d clean forgotten. He’ll be asleep somewhere. Sleep!” Then they came and found me, and of course found me asleep, and made fitting remarks. I relate this little incident at full length because it happened to be the only cheerful happening of that disastrous trip. Directly the fog lifted and we had re-erected the tent and had some breakfast, we took a sieve and a spade or two and started towards the beach, leaving one of the crew to watch tent and cutter. It was probably nearer four miles south than three--a long, wearisome drag through heavy sand for the most part, for the tide was high and we could not follow the water’s edge. At length we came to it, and I must confess that when I first set eyes upon that beautiful stretch of clean and polished gravel I felt that Jim had been right, and that here, if anywhere in German South-West, we should find the “big stones” in plenty. For this mile-long beach looked like a vast débris heap of all the fancy pebbles the “new-chum” digger usually collects during his first month or so on the River Diggings: striped agates of all shades, jaspers, cornelians, chalcedonies, and above all the yellow-and-black striped banded ironstone, _band-toms_ of the digger.