The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: tell me, and you never have."
"You had better not ask me to," he answered, "for it is a longish one."
"All right," I said, "the evening is young, and there is some more
port."
Thus adjured, he filled his pipe from a jar of coarse-cut Boer tobacco
that was always standing on the mantelpiece, and still walking up and
down the room, began--
"It was, I think, in the March of '69 that I was up in Sikukuni's
country. It was just after old Sequati's time, and Sikukuni had got
into power--I forget how. Anyway, I was there. I had heard that the
Bapedi people had brought down an enormous quantity of ivory from the
Long Odds |