“Well, I got it to show you, because this
is what the man who said he had seen the
white people brought with him, and be
cause it does more or less give an air of
truth to what I should otherwise have set
down as a lie. Look here; I will tell you
all that I know about the matter, which is
not muck One afternoon, just before sun
down, I was sitting on the veranda, when
a poor, miserable, starved-looking man
came limping up and squatted down be
fore me. I asked him where he came from
and what he wanted; and thereon he
plunged into a long, rambling narrative
about how he belonged to a tribe far in the
north, and how his tribe was destroyed by
another tribe, and he, with a few other
survivors, driven still further north past
a lake named Laga. Thence, it appears,
he made Ids way to another lake that lay
up in the mountains, ‘a lake without a bot
tom,’ he called it, and here his wife and
brother died of an infectious sickness—
probably small pox—whereon the people
drove him out of their villages into the
wilderness, where he wandered miserably
over mountains for ten days, after which
he got into dense thorn forests, and was
one day found there by some white men
who were hunting, and who took him to a
place where all the people were white, and
lived in stone houses. Here he remained a
week shut up in a house, till one night a
man with a white beard, whom lie under
stood to be a ‘medicine man.’ came and in
spected him, after which he was led off
and taken through the thorn forest to the
coniines of the wilderness, and given food
and this sword (at least so he said!, and
turned loose.”
“Well,” said Sir Henry, who had been
listening with breathless interest, “and
what did he do then?”
“Oh! he seems, according to his account,
to have gone through sufferings and hard
ships innumerable, and to have lived for
weeks on roots and berries, and such tilings
as ho could catch and kill. Hut somehow
he did live, and at last, by slow degrees,
made bis way south and reached this
place. 