The White Hecatomb And Other Stories Author:William Charles Scully General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1897 Original Publisher: H. Holt and Company Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustration... more »s and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: GQUMA; OR, THE WHITE WAIF. " A sun-child whiter than the whitest snows Was born out of the world of sunless things That round the round earth flows and ebbs and flows!" -THALASSIUS. IHE fish had been biting splendidly since midnight, and when at dawn we ran the boat into a little creek which branched from the main lagoon between steep, shelving, rocky banks overhung with forest, we counted out eleven " kabeljouws," the lightest of which must have weighed fifteen pounds, while the heaviest would certainly have turned the scale at fifty. We laid them out, 'Nqalat£ and I, on the smooth, coo) rock shelves. The fish more recently caught were yet quivering, and the lovely pink and purple flushes still chased each other along their shining sides. 'Nqalate, like all Kafirs, hated having to touch fish; he regarded them as water snakes with a bad smell superimposed upon the ordinary ophidian disadvantages. After cleansing the " kabeljouws " under my directions, he washed and re-washed his hands with great vigor ; but, to judge by theexpression of his face when he smelled them afterward, the result of the scrubbing was not satisfactory. The morning was cool and bracing, and a wonderful breeze streamed in over the bar at the mouth of the lagoon, where the great ocean rollers were thundering. A flock of wild geese arose and flew inland after their night's feeding, uttering wild screams of delight as they soared into the sunli...« less