THE KOPJE FARM

Those stirring times are days of the past, and the unsheathed sword has given place to the ploughshare, but weird pictures of bloodshed among man and beast are indelibly impressed on Jack Lovats brain, and his dreams of to-day are often linked with the scenes enacted during the "White Mens War" beneath the glittering Southern Cross. Jack Lovat was not a Colonial bred and born, for his boyhood had been passed amid the peaceful surroundings of a Highland sheep farm in dear old Scotland. Mr. Lovat, Jacks father, had been a laird of substantial means, and was descended from a line of ancestors in whose veins coursed a strain of royal blood; but bad times came, and Jack, instead of proceeding to Loretto, took passage as a member of the Lovat family, in a Castle liner bound for Cape Town. Jack was seventeen at the time our story opens. Rather above the middle height, he was broad, and his bronzed features testified to his three years sojourn on the South African veldt. The Kaffirs on his fathers ostrich farm, near Orangefontein, had dubbed him "The Strong-armed Baas," only a month later than his advent to the holding locally known as "The Kopje Farm." Pete, the Kaffir who acted as native foreman to Mr. Lovat, declared that "Baas Jack" could fell the biggest ox ever inspanned in a Cape waggon, which of course was an exaggeration of a very bad type, but to which statement Pete and the other "boys" employed on the estate pinned implicit faith. The dogs of war had been let loose in South Africa, but Orangefontein had not been troubled as yet. Ladysmith, Kimberley, and gallant little tin-roofed Mafeking had been besieged and relieved, but round the homes of the settlers near Ookiep and Orangefontein tranquillity reigned...