Perhaps He Had A Perception Of What I Felt - Yet I
Hardly Think So; Perhaps He Thought I Was In
Trouble, for he crept
close up to me, and put one tiny brown paw into my hand, which he
stroked
With the other, and asked (like most coloured people) if I
had children. I said, 'Yes, at home in England;' and he patted my
hand again, and said, 'God bless them!' It was a relief to feel
that he was pleased, for I should have felt like a murderer if my
curiosity had added a moment's pain to so tragic a fate.
This may sound like sentimentalism; but you cannot conceive the
effect of looking on the last of a race once the owners of all this
land, and now utterly gone. His look was not quite human,
physically speaking; - a good head, small wild-beast eyes, piercing
and restless; cheek-bones strangely high and prominent, nose QUITE
flat, mouth rather wide; thin shapeless lips, and an indescribably
small, long, pointed chin, with just a very little soft white
woolly beard; his head covered with extremely short close white
wool, which ended round the poll in little ringlets. Hands and
feet like an English child of seven or eight, and person about the
size of a child of eleven. He had all his teeth, and though shrunk
to nothing, was very little wrinkled in the face, and not at all in
the hands, which were dark brown, while his face was yellow.
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