for it is when she is not there to watch that he becomes drunken.

"Mavoom left, and twelve days went by while I and my mistress the
Shepherdess sat at the Settlement waiting till he returned. Now it is
the custom of my mistress, when she is dressed, to read each morning
from a certain holy book in which are written the laws of that
Great-Great whom she worships. On the thirteenth morning, therefore, she
sat beneath the verandah of the house, reading in the book according to
her custom, and I went about my work making food ready. Suddenly I heard
a tumult, and looking over the wall which is round the garden and to the
left of the house, I saw a great number of men, some of them white,
some Arab, and some half-breeds, one mounted and the others on foot,
and behind them a long caravan of slaves with the slave-sticks set upon
their necks.

"As they came these men fired guns at the people of the Settlement,
who ran this way and that. Some of the people fell, and more were made
captive, but others of them got away, for they were at work in the
fields and had seen the slave-traders coming.

"Now, as I gazed affrighted, I saw my mistress, the Shepherdess, flying
towards the wall behind which I stood, the book she was reading being
still in her hand. But as she reached it, the man mounted on the mule
overtook her, and she turned about and faced him, setting her back
against the wall. Then I crouched down and hid myself among some
banana-trees, and watched what passed through a crack in the wall.

"The man on the mule was old and fat, his hair was white and his face
yellow and wrinkled. I knew him at once, for often I have heard of him
before, who has been the terror of this country for many years. He is