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 Cumming, 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 
i 
