Swallow Author:Henry Rider Haggard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER in THE STOBT OF THE SHIPWBEOK shall we do with this boy whom Suzanne has brought to us, wife?" asked Jan of me that day while both the children lay... more » asleep. " Do with him, husband 1" I answered; " we shall keep him; he is the Lord's gift." " He is English, and I hate the English," said Jan, looking down. " English or Dutch, husband, he is of noble blood, and the Lord's gift, and to turn him away would be to turn away our luck." " But how if his people come to seek him? " " When they come we will talk of it, but I do not think that they will come; I think that the sea has swallowed them all." After that Jan said no more of this matter for many years; indeed I believe that from the first he desired to keep the child, he who was sonless. Now while the boy lay asleep Jan mounted his horse and rode for two hours to the stead of our neighbour, the Heer van Vooren. This Van Vooren was a very rich man, by far the richest of us outlying Boers, and he had come to live in these wilds because of some bad act that he had done; I think that it was the shooting of a coloured personwhen he was angry. He was a strange man and much feared, sullen in countenance, and silent by nature. It was said that his grandmother was a chieftainess among the red Kaffirs, but if so, the blood showed more in his son and only child than in himself. Of this son, who in after years was named Swart Piet, and his evil doings I shall have to tell later in my story, but even then his dark face and savage temper had earned for him the name of " the little Kaffir." Now the wife of the Heer van Vooren was dead, and he had a tutor for his boy Piet, a poor Hollander body who could speak English. That man knew figures also, for once when, thinking that I should be too clever for him, I aske...« less