VARIOUS. 75 



Strange it is, that the human hand, eye and nerve are 

 so constituted as to act automatically and correctly at 

 the proper moment, almost without a conscious effort on 

 our own part. 



The reader must be now tired of buffalo, buffalo r 

 toujours buffalo, and I must appeal to his feelings of 

 charity by explaining that to my mind the buffalo of 

 Africa is the finest game in existence. 



Some may ask : " Wherein lies his beauty ?" To such 

 I would reply : " His beauty lies in his very ugliness ; nor 

 can he be rightly judged save by those who have hunted 

 him amid his natural surroundings ". How can one de- 

 scribe the grace and stateliness of a stag to those who have 

 never had one before their rifle, and have only seen a stag 

 within the iron railings of a pen in the Zoological Gardens? 

 Or how could one bring home to the mind of a person 

 who had only seen a salmon on the slab of a fishmonger's 

 shop, the loveliness of a fine, short, thick, small-headed 

 fresh-run salmon, with the steely sheen of his scales glitter- 

 ing in the light of day as he springs from the surface of 

 the porter-coloured pool in his frantic endeavours to 

 shake the fatal fly from his mouth ? 



Feeble is my pen, and weak is my best effort. I can 

 only appeal to the feeling of keen sympathy with Nature 

 which exists in the breasts of all sportsmen, and which 

 more or less enables them to enter into the emotions of 

 fellow-sportsmen in every branch of the chase. 



Having completed my bag of forty buffalos, I returned 

 to Jozanns, and went down to Umkotyisa's kraal to 

 shoot eland, roan antelope, blue wildebeeste, water-buck, 

 koodoo, zebra and sassaby. 



I left the rest of the party to superintend the removal 

 of our camp and all the paraphernalia up to Jozanns. 



