might serve as a cover for the invader—­in the improbable event of his drawing so near—­or that might stand within the zone of our gun-fire, had been ruthlessly levelled to the ground.  A high barbed wire fence surrounded the various camps, and the vigilant piquet had orders to shoot down anybody who attempted to cross it.  Every imaginable precaution had been taken to hold the fort at all costs.  The rumour-monger had formally made his debut, and was busy drawing upon the reservoirs of his excellent imagination, and disseminating information gathered from a mystic source known only to himself.  He knew the exact day and hour of the entrance into Kimberley of the British troops; he could detail their plans to the letter, and a lot more than anybody else (including the British troops) concerning them.  The rumour-monger became a character, a siege character, an adventitious celebrity, destined to receive attention from a facetious press and the tongues of men.  So the day passed, with plenty to encourage, plenty to talk and laugh about, plenty to predict about, plenty to see and hear, and as yet, thank goodness, plenty to eat and drink.

Early on Monday morning, a mounted detachment, accompanied by the armoured train and two hundred men of the Lancashire Regiment, went forth to reconnoitre.  The procession was an imposing one; at least the Boers encamped at Scholtz’s Nek appeared to think so; they made no attempt to interfere with it, and thus debarred the procession from interfering with them.

But meanwhile domestic concerns were getting serious, and absorbing the minds of the people.  The grocers of Kimberley are a respectable and, in the aggregate, a public-spirited body of citizens; they are men of substance; most honourable; most humane, too; and, as events were to show, most human.  With fine foresight they detected in the conflagration of patriotism which consumed the consumer, a chance of bettering themselves.  Having a constitutional right to do it, they took this tide in their affairs at what they (rather hastily) conceived to be its flood.  Actuated by motives of the new ("enlightened”) self-interest, they had proceeded to run up the prices of their goods by nice and easy gradations of from ten to twenty, thence to fifty, and were well on their way to a hundred, per cent., when a thunderbolt, an unexpected projectile, smashed the ring.  It was a pity, in a way, for the process of welding the ring, so to speak, had been carried out with admirable skill.  Rich folk, whose balances at the bank ran into six, and seven, figures, had commenced operations; they were buying up supplies of all and sundry, and hanging the expense.  People with a thousand or two were nowhere in the aristocratic rush, and they waxed indignant; they could buy a quantity of provisions, to be sure; but semi-millionaires could buy so much more—­a shop or two, perchance.  Thus it was that the “comfortable classes” deemed it their duty to protest.  And right royally