was the order, a portmanteau-word describing a morning spent in grazing the horses, and bathing ourselves.  My diary of April 8th says, “Yesterday about twenty of us went out to practice swimming with horses.  We rode about seven miles to a deepish river, stripped, off-saddled, and swam them across.  Some wouldn’t do it at all, but most of them swam across and back.  You buckle the rein up short and leave him alone.  It’s a very queer motion at first.  One of those I took declined to go in, in spite of half a dozen chaps goading him on in various ways, and finally bolted away over the veldt, carrying me naked.  He soon came back though.  The horses have got the habit now of sticking together, and if they get loose in camp never leave the lines.  It is a nuisance sometimes, if you have to act as a single mount, and ride away on some errand.  My Argentine greatly resents such a move, and tries to circle like a clockwork mouse.  She has grown as fat as a pig, though some horses are doing poorly.  The oats are of a very bad quality.”

That brings me to my horses and my own work.  We all of us changed horses a good deal in those days, and I and the roan had several partings and re-unitings.  As a spare driver, my own work was very varied, now of driving in a team, now of riding spare horses, and occasionally of acting as a mounted gunner.  Williams was a regular mounted gunner, his mount being a wicked, disreputable-looking little Argentine (called “Pussy” (with a lisp) for her qualities), to whom he owed three days in hospital at one time from a bad kick, but whom he ended by transforming into as smart and peaceable a little mount as you could find.  My own chance came at last; and when about the end of April one of our drivers was sent home sick, I took his place as centre driver of an ammunition waggon, and kept it permanently.  I said good-bye to the roan and Argentine, and took over a fine pair of bays.

My chief impression of the weather is that of heat and dust, but there were times when we thought the dreaded rainy season had begun; when the camp was a running morass, and we crouched in our tents, watching pools of water soaking under our harness sheets, and counting the labour over rusted steel.  But it used to pass off, leaving a wonderful effect; every waste oat seed about the camp sprouted; little green lawns sprang up in a single night round the places where the forage was heaped, and the whole veldt put on a delicate pink dress, a powder of tiny pink flowers.

By the middle of May we began to think we had been forgotten altogether, but at last, on the morning of the 17th of May, as we were marching out to drill, an orderly galloped up, and put a long blue letter into the Captain’s hand.  We had seen this happen before, and our discussions of the circumstance, as we rode along, were sceptical, but this time we were wrong.

CHAPTER IV.

BLOEMFONTEIN.