him now, entering the room noiselessly with cautious tread as if it were a sick-room, softly drawing a curtain to let a little light into the darkened apartment, and approaching with a cup of tea that the poor invalid has barely to reach out his hand to.  Round our little camp I look, noting trifles with a keen enjoyment.  Shall I ever submit to that varlet again?  No, never!  I will leap from my bed and wrestle with him on the floor.  I will anoint him with my shaving soap and duck him in the bath he meant for me.  Do you know the emancipated feeling yourself?  Do you know the sensation when your glance is like a sword-thrust and your health like a devil’s; when just to touch things with your fingers gives a thrill, and to look at and see common objects, sticks and trees, is like drinking wine?  Don’t you?  Oh, be called by twenty footmen and be hanged to you!

This Christmas patrol of ours was of use in touching the southernmost and westernmost limits of the Boer position.  It has shown that the enveloping movement of which so much has been said, and which has been pressed now and then on the east side, has not made much progress on the west.

The big mountain range, running east and west, comes to an end some thirty miles west of Modder Camp, where it breaks up into a few detached masses and peaks.  The extreme one of these, a sugar-loaf cone, is called the Pintberg, and on this lonely eerie a picket of ours is generally placed; crouched among the few crags and long grass tufts that form its point, the horses tethered in the hollow behind; listening by night and watching by day.  When we come out thus far, we sometimes stay out a week or more at a time.  The enemy’s position is along the hills north of the plain by the river—­chiefly north of it, but in places south.

I am turning over my diary with the idea of giving you a notion of the sort of life we lead, but find nothing remarkable.

“Last night, Vice, Dunkley, and I were on lookout on the kopje.  There had been a heavy storm in the afternoon and another broke as we reached the hill.  We crouched in our cloaks waiting for it to pass before climbing up, as the ironstone boulders are supposed to attract the lightning (I have heard it strike them; it makes a crack like a pistol-shot, and Colonials don’t like staying on the hill tops during a storm).  We passed all night on our airy perch among the rocks, half wet and the wind blowing strong.  It was a darkish and cloudy night, rather cold.  Watched the light die out of the stormy sky; the lightning flickering away to leeward; wet gleams from the plain where the water shone here and there; moaning and sighing of wind through rock and branch.  We were relieved by Lancers in the morning and jogged back to Thornhill, where our little camp is, and I am writing this in the shade of a big mimosa close to the garden wall.