But To Billy Was
Reserved The Most Ridiculous Contrast Of All.
Her bedroom opened
to a veranda a few feet above a formal garden.
This was a very
formal garden, with a sundial, gravelled walks, bordered flower
beds, and clipped border hedges. One night she heard a noise
outside. Slipping on a warm wrap and seizing her trusty revolver
she stole out on the veranda to investigate. She looked over the
veranda rail. There just below her, trampling the flower beds,
tracking the gravel walks, endangering the sundial, stood a
hippopotamus!
We had neighbours six or seven miles away. At times they came
down to spend the night and luxuriate in the comforts of
civilization. They were a Lady A., and her nephew, and a young
Scotch acquaintance the nephew had taken into partnership. They
had built themselves circular houses of papyrus reeds with
conical thatched roofs and earth floors, had purchased ox teams
and gathered a dozen or so Kikuyus, and were engaged in breaking
a farm in the wilderness. The life was rough and hard, and Lady
A. and her nephew gently bred, but they seemed to be having quite
cheerfully the time of their lives. The game furnished them meat,
as it did all of us, and they hoped in time that their labours
would make the land valuable and productive. Fascinating as was
the life, it was also one of many deprivations. At Juja were a
number of old copies of Life, the pretty girls in which so
fascinated the young men that we broke the laws of propriety by
presenting them, though they did not belong to us.
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