nowhere else.  The tobacconists were selling off, at quadrupled rates, quantities of ancient, nasty-smelling “safety-matches,” which but yesterday, alas! they would have paid us to bury somewhere!  Of course there were wide possibilities of economy in this direction—­the one match often putting the kettles to boil in half a street.  The waste in the matter of pipe-kindling had to be modified, and the mediaeval makeshift of flint and steel restored.  The fierce rays of Sol, through the media of our monocles, were also utilised to light cigars.  What else on Saturday?  Yes, Mafeking, they said, was fighting on still; and Generals Buller and Warren had forded the Tugela, en route to Ladysmith.  That their plunge might stimulate Methuen to burn his boots and brave the turgid waters of the Modder, was the fervent wish of Kimberley at the end of fourteen weeks of irksome, emaciating duress.

CHAPTER XV

Week ending 27th January, 1900

The whirligig of the enemy (time, not the Boer, not the “Law”) had again carried us to the beginning of another week.  The Sundays were now exceedingly dull, and on the particular Sabbath with which I am dealing little worthy of record came within the sphere of my observations.  I shall therefore—­in the absence of matter of graver import—­take advantage of its Sunday silence to say a word or two about the Diamond Fields’ Advertiser.  The views of the besieged in regard to their local print had undergone a change.  They had at one time been proud of their paper.  It had formerly been conducted on well-defined principles; and it was its departure from these principles to the status of an “Organ” that preached, but which at the frown of a Draconic Colonel practised not its articles—­it was this that brought down upon its head the wrath of the local democracy.  The authorities had for a while permitted the paper to publish war-scraps; but whether it was due to a tendency on the Editor’s part to expand these allowances, the privilege was withdrawn and scraps were proscribed.  Even the fiction in the columns of our journal was subjected to a rigid censorship; and when the Public had expected it to be voicing their protests against the Russian government of the day, the paper was virtually in Slavonic hands and controlled by the Czar himself.  Its eight large pages had been reduced to four small ones, which became better known as the “Official Gazette” of the district.  But though we read in it garrison orders from time to time, the three-penny novelette of the town would have been a more fitting designation.  It had once quoted from a London contemporary a statement to the effect that hundreds of lives had been thrown away at Magersfontein in an attempt to rescue Cecil Rhodes!  Our “Organ” was then independent enough to retort that there was, besides Mr. Rhodes, the fate of thousands of British subjects to be considered.  But now it was far otherwise; the independence of tone had vanished.  Instead of dignified sarcasm, we were apologetically regaled with parallels of all the sieges in the world’s history—­Troy, Plevna, Sebastopol, Paris, etc.—­and calmly assured that our tribulations weighed lightly in the balance with what was suffered in the brave days of—­“wooden” horseflesh!