unprecedented that toothache was an epidemic until French relieved it.  How the shop assistant clung to his reason is a mystery which has yet to be solved.  Behind the counter he was hampered by the local elite:  Judges, Doctors, Directors, etc., who would never say die (from hunger) while they lived.  Outside the counter the madding throng felt likewise.  But the great ones were able to help themselves; they inspected the shelves, perused the labels of every antiquated sauce and pickle bottle in stock since the “early days,” and placed the best of these relics of a pre-consolidated era in heaps aside for Monday’s dinner.  There were special constables on duty within and without the store, which was as full as an egg; and when after a while it was apparent that this congestion retarded business, the hundred Christians nearest the door were hustled into the street with all the “good will” in the world.  But the relief came too late; the clock struck nine ere half the multitude were served—­or even formally satisfied that blood is not in turnips.  Of the merry season we were wont to enjoy, the busy throng was the sole reminiscence.  Its good things were absent.  But that bitter truth did not make less keen our hunt the slipper pursuit of Christmas fare.

CHAPTER XI

Week ending 30th December, 1899

Christmas Eve—­a memorable day in its own way—­dawned in due course.  It was not the siege alone, with its attendant inconveniences, that made it memorable.  It was not that the season accentuated the want of enough to eat; nor was it the absence of the time-honoured turkey that tried us most.  There was something else besides, namely, the capers of the sun.  Thermal phenomena are of course not strictly pertinent to my story.  But I feel impelled to digress for a little and warm, as it were, to this new element of discomfort, provided doubtless as a Christmas Box by the thoughtful clerk of the weather.  To those of us who were enjoying our first taste of a sunny southern summer the heat of the day was excruciating; it literally took one’s breath away.  A man could not even read; he tried to, in the hope of falling asleep incidentally.  But in vain.  ‘Nature’s soft nurse’ was not to be cajoled by artifice.  There was no air, no breeze to fan her softness.  The thermometer registered on its imperturbable face one hundred and seven in the shade, at which experts who had passed the whole of their summers in the furnace of the Diamond City inveighed against the slowness of the instrument and its lapse from the path of rectitude.  The cant of the day ordained the twenty-fifth of December the “hottest day of the year.”  Well, the newcomers felt that if it were to be redder than the twenty-fourth they might jump into the Kimberley mine, without danger of landing on their feet, and enjoy a better pudding in a better and (perhaps) cooler world.  It was a day to make one fed in all seriousness