was derailed, or a post attacked, or a reconnoitring patrol chased merrily back to camp with a horse or two wounded, or sometimes, alas! with a message for the ambulance. Every day the trains bustled up and down like frightened gossips with stirring tales for eager ears at every wayside station. Some of these little incidents were productive of much gallantry, all of much talk and pother amongst the lines of communication. The Dublin Fusiliers, already with a full cargo of glory won in Natal, could not of course allow so splendid a chance of a fight as that afforded by the guardianship of a station surrounded by kopjes to escape. So they were duly attacked by overwhelming numbers up there at Zuikerbosch, and as a matter of course repulsed the enemy with great slaughter, to the immense credit of Major English and all hands. Lord Strathcona's Horse, too, enjoyed themselves vastly, and surrounded snipers in farmhouses, and got surrounded by snipers themselves with unfailing dash, regularity, and success, doing a great amount of useful, plucky work with small loss. Then Thorneycroft's Mounted Infantry (strenuous, hard-bitten, fighting lot that

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they are, no corps in the British army has taken and given harder blows) took up the running, and whilst cursing their luck at being "left" and split up, managed to keep themselves amused by using their halfdozen detachments to inflict as many annoyances daily upon the ubiquitous Dutchmen. Once indeed they were the actors in a little tragedy, up on the shoulder of glum, round-backed Rooikopji. Even Thorneycroft's, used as they are "doing a man's work with a boy," cannot expect to storm a hundred Boer marksmen off a precipice with a mere patrol, and back they had to come, leaving four killed upon the hillside and their gallant and accomplished captain severely wounded. Then the writer's little post had its turn a very mild one, but still turn, especially for the Boers. One still dark night a small party of the latter, perhaps thirty in number, all unaware of the dominant Power sleeping wakefully at one of their favourite level crossings, attempted to ride over the line for purpose unknown, and in their ignorance almost walked over a sentry peering out over sunken trench. Bang! bang! bang! said the sentry-remarks repeated by a brother sentry a few yards away. Terror and amaze amongst the prowlers, who gallop for the crossing, to fall "in hideous ruin " over that ancient and honourable device, a slack wire hung with tin pots. A crashing volley from the garden wall completes the rout; away they gallop again, quadrupedante putrem,

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with an agitated thudding of ponies' hoofs over the grass, past another sentry who claims rapidly to the full extent of his magazine at the receding sound. Brother Boer must find another crossing, a task unfortunately only too easy, unless his nerves have sustained too great a shock to allow him to attempt it. Yes, we on the lines of communication are doubtless "left," but we have our consolations, thanks to the commando over there on the ridge.

But all is not well with that commando. One day a Cape cart is seen approaching over the veldt like a fat black snail, with a little white parallelogram upon its shell. A white flag, by the gods! On it comes, hesitatingly and apologetically, and is "held up" by two men of our guard who go forth to meet it. It is a Burgher coming in from the kopje to surrender, mauser and bandolier complete, evidently in a great stew as to the treatment to be expected at the hands of the dominant Power. But alarm soon subsides when the programme is explained: he must first take the eed, the oath of neutrality, sign his name thereto, then run away and play and be a good boy! He is frankly surprised, and in the fulness of his heart delivers himself of a fluent Dutch period, the English equivalent of which we gather to be that there is more where this came from, -we may expect other Cape carts and white handkerchiefs. He then drives away with the air of a man who has done a

good day's work, and a wave of the hand as if to say "Adieu, dominant Power, you are good and gracious, and extraordinarily convenient, but forgive me privately ruminating upon your slight but undoubted silliness!" But he has not lied, and sure enough next day up come two more Cape carts, with their cargo of mausers and Dutchmen, named in order of importance. The day following three more, until we have about twenty names on the books. "More than we killed at Colenso!" says the detachment with a gratified smirk. Then comes stupendous news. The field cornet and most of his men have surrendered en bloc up at the big camp some miles above us. The big commando exists no longer-well done the lines of communication! All day the Burghers from the other camp trot by our post, one of them refusing to halt in spite of two warning shots fired by a sentry suspicious of the galloping horseman, and not yet informed of the surrender, eventually getting a through his pony as a hint to mend his manners now that he is a British subject. A pardonable mistake-firstly, because of the Boer's own action in galloping the faster at the warning shot instead of halting; secondly, because at this precise moment the unregenerated relics of the commando, now reduced to the status of loafers, are firing upon the Burghers as they troop back to their farms, even chasing the more timorous of them up to our station. A Gilbertian situation, not without its humour, and certainly not devoid of annoyance and shame to the paternal but helpless dominant Power.

During the ensuing week there was a steady flow of Burghers surrendering at our post, the now small commando was becoming smaller and more loafing and disreputable; then a pause. A proclamation had appeared ordaining with many a "whereas" that henceforth no surrendering Dutchman should be permitted to take the oath and depart, but should be detained as a prisoner of war to be dealt with as that tremendous little "Frederick Sleigh, Baron Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford, K.P., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., V.C., FieldMarshal Commanding in Chief," should direct! It is nothing short of marvellous how instantaneously the utterances of our splendid "Bobs" with his processional titles have penetrated to the uttermost dongas of the enemy! Not a Boer came in whilst that proclamation was in force, with its visions of unknown seas and expatriation unbearable. Then a counterorder, decreeing three days of grace before the enforcement of the ukase. Twenty Boers came in that day to our post alone, and a few more on each of the remaining days, bringing our "bag" up to sixty-five. "More than we have ever seen dead," chuckles the detachment, eyeing the little clumps of dingy careworn men who congregate daily in front of our main trench. There is something intensely fascinating about them! This one lay in the river-bed at Co

lenso, and is able to tell the very men who had rushed to attack it (infandum renovare dolorem!) how they looked from the other side. Another formed one of the party who hung on to the shell - stricken razor - back of Vaalkrantz; another had crouched all day thirty yards from British rifles on the bloody summit of Spion Kop; another had seen his townsfolk blasted and charged from off the face of Pieter's Hill. They are all fighting Boers in this district, the commando from which they come has been as ubiquitous as the battalion to which they surrender, and very battered and war-worn are the mausers they hand in. A noticeable feature about them is their extreme modesty and reticence with regard to their fighting experiences. It is the hardest thing in the world to "draw" a Boer into a description of his share in an action, but once "drawn" no map could show more faithfully than his memory the disposition of his own and the enemy's forces on the day in question. Long years of unconscious working out of topographical problems in pursuit of buck and black men have made his mind as wax to retain impressions of the "lie" of valleys and spurs. As he talks in his jerky rumble, fit clothing for the atrocious taal, with the toe of his boot or the end of his sjambok he will scratch you out in the dust a rough plan of the operations under discussion such as the most accomplished of Staff College draughtsmen, with dainty sketching-case and chalks of many colours, could not beat for clearness and ac

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curacy. But, as I say, he will talk but rarely. After his first official visit he comes daily up to our post-not for reminiscences and gossip, but for flour and sugar, and above all for a "pass": a "pass" to go and visit his grandmother, to fetch a plough from a neighbour's farm, to drive his sheep in from the spruit across the railway, to look for a strayed horse. In fact, what with his "passes and his persistent patronage of the little food depot presided over by a non commissioned officer for his benefit, he is almost more of a nuisance as a peaceful fellow-subject than he was when flitting about the kopje mauser in hand: when jokingly told as much, he responds with his melancholy smile, and asks the price of jam! It is amusing to watch the relations that soon spring up between the colony of dependent Burghers and the sergeant in charge of their food depot. The latter is a little bustling man, smart and prompt in all his actions, and quite intolerant of people who "hang about" and waste time. One is irresistibly reminded of relieving officer fussing over a batch of timid paupers as one watches him taking the orders of a number of big leisurely Boers, who exasperate him with their indecision and slowness. How he smacks down the change into their huge palms, and wheels the multifarious parcels into line before them with as much clatter as if the rectangle of sugar or coffee were a squad of backward recruits! Hear his admonition three parts English, one part dialected

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dialect-when a big Dutchman, after brooding over his purchases for some moments, solemnly intimates that he thinks he will yet require something else. The Boers have been It is

called keen bargainers. difficult to believe it of them, given as they are to absentmindedness and long musings. I have spoken before of the melancholy of the veldt: it is apparent in every line of their quiet, furrowed faces, with the deep-set eyes drawn sadly down at the outer angles, and the grave mouths under the aquiline noses. Whence did the Boers get those wonderful noses? "All the blood of all the Howards" could not produce a more dignified proboscis than adorns the countenance of many a Boer. To the artist in search of a model for grand old age the Transvaal farms would be a paradise: every other one would give him a Moses or a Ugolino in the father of the family, and many a yellow-bearded Siegfried amongst the sons. The genuine Boers are undoubtedly a handsome race, and, after all, their big bodies only carry out a natural law in so often giving houseroom to the pettiest of intellects. We leave it to students of ethnology to determine how long it will take us to convert a nation of foolish giants into quick-witted "ordinaries" -a process for which civilisation is somewhat famous infamous.

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