yes, nurse.  If I were not a married man, I should try to thank you gracefully.”  “Oh, yees; oh, yees,” she answered, tossing back her head; “that is all right.  You say those pretty things; then, when you go away from here, you tell your wife, and you write in your papers we Boer girls are fat old things, who never use soap and water.  All the Rooibaatjes do that.”  And off she went, laughing merrily, whilst my friends the enemy grinned and enjoyed the little comedy.  So we fell to talking, and-half a dozen wounded “Tommies” gathered round and chipped into the conversation, which by degrees worked round to a deed which the West Australians did; and as I listened to the tale so simply told by those rough farmer men, I felt my face flush with pride, and my shoulders fell back square and solid once more, whilst every drop of blood in my veins seemed to run warm and strong, like the red wine they grow on the hillside in my own sunny land; for the story concerned men whom I knew well, men who were bred with the scent of the wattle in the first breath they drew, men who grew from childhood to manhood where the silver sentinel stars form the cross in the rich blue midnight sky.  My countrymen—­Australians—­men with whom I had hunted for silver in the desolate backblocks of New South Wales; men with whom I had scoured the interior of West Australia seeking for gold; men who had been with me on the tin fields and opal fields.  I had never doubted that they would keep their country’s name unsullied when they met the foe on the field of war, yet when I heard the tale the enemy told I felt my eyes fill as they have seldom filled since childhood, for I was proud of the western diggers, proud of my blood; and at that moment, with British “Tommies” sprawling on the grass at my feet, and the Boer farmers grouped amongst them, I would sooner have called myself an Australian commoner than the son of any peer in any other land under high heaven.

I will take the story from the Boer’s mouth and tell it to you, as I hope to tell it round a hundred camp fires when the war is over, and I go back to the Australian bush once more.  “It happened round Colesberg way,” he said; “we thought we had the British beaten, and our commandant gave us the word to press on and cut them to pieces.  Our big guns had been grandly handled, and our rifle fire had told its tale.  We saw the British falling back from the kopjes they had held, and we thought that there was nothing between us and victory; but there was, and we found it out before we were many minutes older.  There was one big kopje that was the very key of the position.  Our spies had told us that this was held by an Australian force.  We looked at it very anxiously, for it was a hard position to take, but even as we watched we saw that nearly all the Australians were leaving it.  They, too, were falling back with the British troops.  If we once got that kopje there was nothing on earth could stop us.  We could pass on and sweep around the retiring foe, and wipe them off the earth, as a child wipes dirt from its hands, and we laughed when we saw that only about twenty Australians had been left to guard the kopje.