I am writing this lying on my back in our tiny tent.  Outside the sun is blazing.  Across the river, on the edge of the hill, our picket, under the lee of a kraal wall, is shooting at intervals.  It sounds as if some one in the distance were chopping wood.  The Colonel and Driscoll are standing just outside watching through their glasses.  They can make out Boer scouts on the horizon, but no one pays much attention.

Driscoll, of Driscoll’s Scouts, is a thick-set, sinewy man, rather short than tall.  He is of an absolute sooty blackness.  Hair and moustache coal-black, and complexion so scorched and swarthy that at a little distance you might almost take him for a nigger.  There is about his face a look of unmistakable determination amounting to ferocity in moments of excitement.  He looks and is a born fighter, but is apt to be over headlong in action.  His scouts are part of our 250 mounted men under Rimington.

As for the Colonel I don’t know if I have ever tried to describe him to you.  He is a man who invites description.  Of all the men in the army he is the one you would single out to sketch.  An artist would be at him at once.  He is the living image of what one imagines Brian de Bois Guilbert to have been.  An inch or two over six feet high, his figure, spare but lengthy and muscular, has been so knocked about (by hunting and polo accidents) that it has rather a lopsided look, and he leans slightly to one side as he walks, but this does not interfere with his strength and activity nor detract from the distinguished and particularly graceful look of the man.  His face, like Driscoll’s, is sun-blackened rather than sun-browned; its general expression stern and grim, and when he is thinking and talking about the Boers (he talks about them just as Bois Guilbert did about the Saracens) this expression deepens into something positively savage, and he looks, and can perhaps sometimes be, a relentless enemy.  But this is only half the man.  In ordinary talk he is quite different.  He has the Celtic sensitiveness and humour.  He is an artist.  His manner among friends is extraordinarily winning and sympathetic, and his grave melancholy face has a way of breaking into a most infectious laugh.  Altogether, what with his tall person, dark determined face, his fierceness and gentleness, and the general air of the devil about him, you are not surprised to find that no soldier’s name is more common in men’s mouths out here than Mike Rimington’s.  You might fit Marmion’s lines to him well enough—­

    “His square-turned joints and length of limb
    Show him no carpet knight so trim,
    But in close fight a warrior grim.”

He ought to have lived five hundred years ago and dressed in chain-mail and led out his lances to plunder and foray.  As it is he does his best even in the nineteenth century.  Picturesque is the word that best describes him.  He makes every one else look hopelessly commonplace.  His men admire him immensely, like him a good deal, and fear him a little.  Generals in command sometimes find him, I fancy, a bit of a handful, that is, if their policy is at all a backward one.  But most people watch him and talk of him with a certain interest, and whatever their opinions or ideas of him may be, one feels sure that none who have once met will easily forget him.