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Jess, by H. Rider Haggard
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Title: Jess
Author: H. Rider Haggard
Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5898]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JESS ***
Produced by John Bickers; Dagny
JESS
By H. Rider Haggard
First Published 1887.
TO MY WIFE
CHAPTER I
JOHN HAS AN ADVENTURE
The day had been very hot even for the Transvaal, where the days still know how to be hot in the autumn, although the neck of the summer is broken--especially when the thunderstorms hold off for a week or two, as they do occasionally. Even the succulent blue lilies--a variety of the agapanthus which is so familiar to us in English greenhouses--hung their long trumpet-shaped flowers and looked oppressed and miserable, beneath the burning breath of the hot wind which had been blowing for hours like the draught from a volcano. The grass, too, near the wide roadway that stretched in a feeble and indeterminate fashion across the veldt, forking, branching, and reuniting like the veins on a lady's arm, was completely coated over with a thick layer of red dust. But the hot wind was going down now, as it always does towards sunset. Indeed, all that remained of it were a few strictly local and miniature whirlwind