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"Bloody young person," Cobby observed.

"Public-spirited, I call it," Rolls replied. "She don't consider that she is there for the good of humanity, look, but for her 'children,' who pay her—is there to make them happy and top-dog; and there's no end to her public-spiritedness, to her devotion to the Wa-Ngwanya, to the anxiety of her forehead for them."

"She has quite a hero-worshipper, Rolls," Cobby remarked with a smile.

"Well, no doubt I am a bit shook on the girl, though I ought to hate the beggar——"

"Why, then, did she sentence you?"

"Only for proposing to her to let me bring her to Europe—nothing more. She seems, by the way, to have as strong a colour-prejudice against us whites as her father probably had against niggers—as good as told me so in four English words—and very strange it was suddenly to hear that English uttered in Wo-Ngwanya—while I stood before her judgment-seat: up she cocks one eye, trying to remember English, and then, wrinkling up her nose, says she: 'Hwhite—mans—is—stink.' The retort leapt to my mouth, 'And what about white girls? They're worse'—eh, but R. K. Rolls was too old a fowl, thank God, to give it tongue. Aye, she had me in chokey six bitter days under sentence of death inside a continent of a rock that they call 'The Elephant'; and what do you think saved me? Seven matches—the last I had. An inspiration came to me to send them as a present, and they so fascinated her, that she let me off, but banished me, commanding me never more to set foot in Wo-Ngwanya."