As our lumbering cab drove up Adderley Street to the hotel a squadron of the newly raised South African Light Horse rode past.  The men looked very jaunty and well set up with their neat uniforms, bandoliers and “smasher” hats with black cocks’ feathers.  There has never been the slightest difficulty in raising these irregular bodies of mounted infantry.  The doors of their office in Atkinson’s Buildings were besieged by a crowd of applicants—­very many of them young men who had arrived from England for the purpose of joining.  A certain amount of perfectly good-humoured banter was levelled against these brand-new soldiers by their friends, and some fun poked at them about their riding.  Occasionally, for instance, a few troopers were unhorsed during parade and the riderless steeds trotted along the public road at Rosebank.  But certainly the tests of horsemanship were severe.  Many of the horses supplied by Government were very wild and sometimes behaved like professional buckjumpers; and it is no easy task to control the eccentric and unexpected gyrations of such a beast when the rider is encumbered with the management of a heavy Lee-Metford rifle.  Since the day on which I first saw the squadron in question it has passed through its baptism of fire at Colenso.  The Light Horse advanced on the right of Colonel Long’s ill-fated batteries, and was cruelly cut up by a murderous fire from Hlangwane Hill.

Capetown is not well furnished with places of amusement.  There is, it is true, a roomy theatre, whose manager, Mr. de Jong, sent an invitation to the staff of the “Pink ’Un” to dine with him and his friends at Pretoria on New Year’s Day!  How the Boers must have laughed when they read of this cordial invitation!  During the few days which elapsed before our ambulance train started for the front we paid a visit to the theatre, but we found the stage tenanted by a “Lilliputian Company,” and it is always tiresome and distressing to watch precocious children of twelve aping their elders.  One feels all the time that the whole performance scarcely rises above an exhibition of highly-trained cats or monkeys, and that the poor mites ought all to be in bed long ago.  Nevertheless, this dreary theatre was, in default of anything better, visited again and again by British officers and others.  A friend of mine in the Guards told me with a sigh that he had actually watched the performances of these accomplished infants for no less than seven nights.

There are several music halls in Capetown.  I have visited similar entertainments in Constantinople, Cairo, Beyrout and other towns of the East, but I never saw anything to match some of these Capetown haunts for out-and-out vulgarity.  There was, it is true, a general air of “patriotism” pervading them—­but it was frequently the sort of patriotism which consists in getting drunk and singing “Soldiers of the Queen”.  On one occasion I remember a curious and typical incident at one of these music halls.  Standing among a