“Oho!” said Retief, “you have sworn your lamb to that hyena, have you?  Well, look out that he does not crack your bones as well as hers, and perhaps some others also.  Why does God give some men a worm in their brains, as He does to the wildebeeste, a worm that always makes them run the wrong way?  I don’t know, I am sure; but you who are very religious, Henri Marais, might think the matter over and tell me the answer when next we meet.  Well, this girl of yours will soon be of age, and then, as I am commandant down yonder where she is going, I’ll see she marries the man she wants, whatever you say, Henri Marais.  Heaven above us!  I only wish it were my daughter he was in love with.  A fellow who can shoot to such good purpose might have the lot of them”; and uttering one of his great, hearty laughs, he walked off to his horse.

On the morrow of this meeting we forded the Tugela and entered the territory that is now called Natal.  Two days’ short trekking through a beautiful country brought us to some hills that I think were called Pakadi, or else a chief named Pakadi lived there, I forget which.  Crossing these hills, on the further side of them, as Retief had told us we should do, we found a large party of the trek-Boers, who were already occupying this land on the hither side of the Bushman’s River, little knowing, poor people, that it was fated to become the grave of many of them.  To-day, and for all future time, that district is and will be known by the name of Weenen, or the Place of Weeping, because of those pioneers who here were massacred by Dingaan within a few weeks of the time of which I write.

Nice as the land was, for some reason or other it did not quite suit my fancy, and therefore, in view of my approaching marriage with Marie, having purchased a horse from one of the trek-Boers, I began to explore the country round.  My object was to find a stretch of fertile veld where we could settle when we were wedded, and such a spot I discovered after some trouble.  It lay about thirty miles away to the east, in the loop of a beautiful stream that is now known as the Mooi River.

Enclosed in this loop were some thirty thousand acres of very rich, low-lying soil, almost treeless and clothed with luxuriant grasses where game was extraordinarily numerous.  At the head of it rose a flat-topped hill, from the crest of which, oddly enough, flowed a plentiful stream of water fed by a strong spring.  Half-way down this hill, facing to the east, and irrigable by the stream, was a plateau several acres in extent, which furnished about the best site for a house that I know in all South Africa.  Here I determined we would build our dwelling-place and become rich by the breeding up of great herds of cattle.  I should explain that this ground, which once, as the remains of their old kraals showed, had belonged to a Kaffir tribe killed out by Chaka, the Zulu king, was to be had for the taking.