590 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



who was tending the sheep. Every one instinctively grasped 

 his weapon, and rushed to the rescue, calling loudly to warn 

 the expected victim of his danger. Without taking the 

 smallest notice of him, however, the infuriated monster 

 dashed past, roaring and lashing his sides, until concealed 

 in the mist. Those who have seen the savage monarch of 

 the forest, in crippled captivity only, immured in a cage 

 barely double his own length, with his sinews relaxed by 

 confinement, have seen but the shadow of that animal which 

 "clears the desert with his rolling eye." 



This is by far the noblest picture of the king of brutes in 

 all the magnificence of his freedom, and terror of his might 

 and wrath, that I remember in the whole range of this species 

 of literature. The simple grandeur of the recital is in most 

 unfavorable contrast with a rather sputtering attempt, on the 

 part of Gumming, to " do up the sublime," in his description 

 of a rencontre with the dreaded "man-eater lion/' which 

 carried off one of his men at night from the midst of his 

 camp, and was next day slain by him. There is such huge 

 overstraining of epithetical horrors on the part of the narrator 

 of an event, sufficiently hideous in itself, that I decline 

 inserting it here but shall quote instead from the gallant 

 Missionary, Moffat, a much more modest and comprehensible 

 account of an incident something parallel, which will at least 

 convey a most clear idea of what the appetite of a lion is, as 

 well as something of the dangers from them to be encountered 

 by the traveller in South Africa. 



Having put my wagon in order, taken a driver, and a little 

 boy as leader of the oxen, and two Barolongs, who were going 

 to the same place, I left the station, my wife and family, for 

 an absence of two or three months. Our journey lay over a 

 wild and dreary country, inhabited by Balalas only, and but 

 a sprinkling of these. On the night of the third day's 

 journey, having halted at a pool, (Khokhole), we listened, 

 on the lonely plain, for the sound of an inhabitant, but all 



