corps for the Boer ponies.  The Major is up to his eyes in work, as officers and orderlies come galloping up with requisitions from the various regiments.  He has the born horse lover’s dislike for parting with a really good horse except to a man he knows something about.  Loud and uproarious is the chaff and protestations (now dropping to confidential mutterings) as the herds of horses are broken up and the various lots assigned.  As I say, it looks from the hilltop exactly like a west country fair on an enlarged scale, and the great lonely Basuto mountains, too, might seem a larger edition of the Exmoor hills around Winsford.  The Boer prisoners, poor fellows, have no eye for the picturesque.  They congregate together and grumble and watch the distribution of their horses with a very sour expression.

From this point we sent our prisoners in, via Winberg, to the railway, the Major and most of the corps going with them as part of the escort; while I with twenty men, consisting partly of Guides and partly of Lovat’s Scouts, was detached to continue as bodyguard to Hunter.  He, with the main column (we reunited at Bethlehem), marched to Lindley and then here to Heilbron.

It was ten miles south of this that we came in contact with Olivier.  Olivier and De Wet had both broken through our cordon at different times and escaped from the hills.  Sent one morning with a message to the Sussex outside Slabbert’s Nek I saw shells bursting, and all the appearance of a heavy fight going on over the hills to the north-west.  This was Christian De Wet, who with several guns and about 1500 well-mounted men, had made a dash for freedom when he found the place was getting too hot, and had been promptly tackled by Broadwood when he got outside.  Pursuer and pursued vanished into the blue distance of the veldt, battering each other as they went, like birds that fight and fly at the same time.  Broadwood, however, had got hold of his enemy by the wrong end.  What happened exactly we don’t know, but De Wet got clear somehow, and immediately turned his attention to his beloved railway line, which he never can tear himself away from for more than a few days at a time.  He is now, I should imagine, in the very seventh heaven of delight, having torn up miles of it, besides capturing several trains.

De Wet is getting an immense reputation.  The rapidity of his movements is extraordinary.  He always has two or three of our columns after him; sometimes half-a-dozen.  Among these he wings his way like a fowl of some different breed, a hawk among owls.  Some amusement was caused by the report in orders the other day that De Wet had marched north pursued “by various generals;” as if two or three, more or less, didn’t matter, as indeed it didn’t.  Of course, mere fast marching would not always extricate him, but he shows such marvellous coolness and common sense in the way in which he doubles.  Several times he has been reported surrounded; but each time when we came to look he had