The Triumph of Hilary Blachland

"Get up, old sportsman! It's time for `scoff.'" And the singer thus breaking off from song to prose, dives his head into the tent door, and apostrophises about six-foot-one of r...

It was post day at Lannercost, and whereas the delivery of Her Majesty's mails was only of weekly occurrence, the fact constituted a small event. Such delivery was effected by t...

Bright and clear and cold, the morning arose. There had been a touch of frost in the night, and the house, lying back in its enclosure of aloe fence, looked as though roofed wit...

The occupation on which the King was then engaged, was the homely and prosaic one of eating his breakfast. This consisted of a huge dish of _bubende_, being certain ingredients...

As they entered the outer enclosure, a deep humming roar vibrated upon the air. Two regiments, fully armed, were squatted in a great crescent, facing the King's private quarters...

"Look at this--and this. Five altogether, and I only had six chances. Not bad, is it? They were beastly wild, you know, and I had to scramble all over that second kopje after th...

The speaker was standing on the stoep, whither she had come out to meet them. She was rather a tall girl, with a great deal of golden hair, arranged in some wonderful way of her...

In the conjecture that his cousin had fallen into an infatuation for Hermia, Hilary Blachland was right--the only respect in which he had failed to grasp the full situation bein...

Sir Luke Canterby looked up from the document he had been perusing and annotating, and biting the end of his pen, sat gazing meditatively out of the window. It was a lovely day...

"No, I'm not. But what then? What if it's four or fourteen or forty? You don't want to go up-country again just yet. By the way, though, it must be mighty slow here."

The remark was inconsequent, in that it came on top of nothing at all. The time was the cool of the evening, and Blachland, lying back in a deep cane chair, was lazily puffing o...

But for it his comrade would have refused to leave him, on that point he was sure, whereas to throw away his life for one who was dead already, would be an act of sheer lunacy o...

The two were standing by the cattle-kraal, which contained a troop of horses just driven in from the veldt. In the thick of them, armed with halters and _reims_, two Kaffir serv...

He who thus unceremoniously burst in upon them, in blissful ignorance of the momentous matter under discussion and of course of how his own fortunes had been balancing in the sc...

And the speaker tapped his foot impatiently upon the virgin soil of Mashunaland, looking very hot, and very tall, and very handsome. The remonstrant, however, received the repet...

"Tumble out, Blachland. We've got to go up and interview the King." Thus Sybrandt at an early hour on the following morning. "And," he added in a low voice, "I hope the _indaba_...

He was chilled and stiff--but the rest and sleep had done him all the good in the world, and now as he sat up in the hard damp rock-crevice, he began to collect his scattered th...

"So, so, Bayfield. How's all yourselves? How do, Miss Bayfield? Had a cold drive? Ha--ha! It must have been nipping when you started this morning. Just look at the frost even no...

If ever any man was in the state colloquially defined as over head and ears in love, and if ever any man had practical demonstration that his love was returned abundantly by the...

On rushed the mighty stream, roaring its swollen course down to the Zambesi, rolling with it the body of dead Ziboza, hacked and ripped, the grand frame of the athletic savage a...

The two men constituting the picket are seated under a bush in blissful unconsciousness; their horses, saddled and bridled, grazing close at hand. Away over the veldt, nearly ha...

For some while after his departure from Lannercost, their recent guest occupied a very large share in the conversation and thoughts of its inmates. He had been so long with them...

Wearily on, from day to day, nearly a hundred and a half of hungry, ragged, footsore men--their clothing well-nigh in tatters, their feet bursting out of their boots, in several...

There is a rustling in the cover, faint at first, but drawing nearer. As it does so, the man with the gun, who has been squatting half concealed by a shrub in one corner of the...

"Is it? Let's go and have a look at it then," was the prompt reply. But immediately upon having made it, the second speaker knew that he had spoken like a fool, for the first ga...

"Three questions at once. That's the feminine cross-examiner all over. Well, it was and it wasn't. There was no doing any trade to speak of, and Lo Ben was in a very _snuffy_ mo...

"Too late, boys, I guess the Southern Column got there first." And the utterer of this remark lowered his field glasses and turned to the remainder of the little band of scouts...

A loud, awful hiss of ear-splitting stridency--and simultaneously there shot up, from the very ground as it were, a long, writhing, sinuous length of black neck, glistening as t...

The huge granite pile loomed forth overhead, grim, frowning, indistinct. Then, as the faint streak in the blackness of the eastern horizon banded into red width, the outlines of...

Such the terse report. The patrol had continued its retreat the night through, taking advantage of the known aversion of the Matabele--in common, by the way, with pretty nearly...

Huge granite piles rearing up skyward in every varied form of bizarre delineation, like the mighty waves of an angry sea suddenly petrified, the great flow of fallen stones cove...

The New Year is very young now, and Lannercost is well-nigh hidden in its wealth of leafiness, and very different is the rich languorous midsummer air to the bracing crispness u...