he dashes off a sketch of South Africa’s future with a few words about farming and gold-mining.  He gives us a cup of hot cocoa all round, which he produces from nowhere, like a conjuring trick, re-arranges our fire, tells us when the war will be over, and strolls off (daring the old colonels with his eye to so much as look at him) to the farm to give the General his final instructions about to-morrow’s action.

Next day our infantry established itself on the lower step of the Boer position, but the final ridge still remained in their hands.  It was a ding-dong fight between the two, for the positions were within half-rifle shot of each other.  However, we could not turn them out, though we got a field-battery right up in the firing line, which cracked shrapnel over them as hard as ever it could load and fire.  They had determined to hold that ridge till night gave them the opportunity of moving off their waggons and guns safely; and hold it they did.  No doubt we could have carried it by storm, but crossing that thousand yards of open ground would have meant a terrible loss, and the General did not attempt it.  As it was, there was a great deal of banging and blazing, almost like the old Modder days, for a time; guns hard at it, and Mausers and Lee-Metfords jabbering away at a great rate, though, as both sides were under cover, the loss was not heavy.  The firing went on till pitch dark, and we camped close under the ridge we had won.  Next morning we found the ridge vacant, with only heaps of empty cartridge cans and an occasional blood-stain on the rocks to show where our enemy had lain.

A little way out from Pretoria there are some very smart-looking new houses, what they call “villa residences” in England, built in the style, a sort of mild and tepid Gothic (what I call grocer’s Gothic, for it always reminds me of brown sugar and arrowroot), common around watering-places; small gables sticking out everywhere, till it looks like a cluster of dog-kennels; walls faced with ornamental tiles and lath and plaster; small shrubberies round, and a name on the gate.  There were two especially beautiful ones.  The General had one and we had the other.  Ours was quite new.  There was no furniture in it; but this, as we had been so long without it, we did not miss.  But everything we really needed—­gorgeous wall-papers, and dados, and polished floors, and electric-bells, and stained-glass windows—­was there.  We had hot baths at the Grand Hotel, and we dined at the club, and we forgot all about the war, and the veldt, and the dust, and the long marches, and the Boer lurking in ambush, and the whispering bullet from the hill.  This went on for two days, and then we marched again, and we have been marching ever since.

We left Pretoria on June 19th, and, taking it easy, reached Bethlehem on July 9th, doing a bit under 200 miles in the twenty days.  The meaning of the new scheme begins to dawn on us.  Clements and Paget have come up from the west; Rundle is down south-west, near Ficksburg; the Basuto border runs up from there south and south-east, and within the ground thus enclosed we have penned a very considerable force of the enemy, among whom is that Jack-in-the-box, Christian De Wet.  We know they are there, and indeed we have little fights with their scouts every day.  The question is, how are we to collar them?  The country is very broken and hilly and very extensive.