Abe Pike--Old Abe Pike, or Uncle Abe as he was variously called--lived in a one-horse shanty in the division of Albany, Cape Colony. I won't locate his farm, for various reasons, beyond saying that there is a solitary blue-gum on the south side of the house and the rudiments of a cowshed on the north. Uncle Abe was not ambitious; he was slow, but he was sure. So he said. One blue-gum satisfied him, and as for the cowshed he meant to complete it during the century. I don't introduce him as a tree planter, but as a narrator of most extraordinary yarns. He called them facts--but of the truth of this the reader may judge. Riding over one warm afternoon, I found him leaning over a water-butt exa…
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