the first word he uttered.  The hon. gentleman thereon indignantly refused to put his question at all; but, being prevailed to do so, gave an opening to a Minister, who devoted ten minutes to a brief invective against all Uitlanders and their friends.  Then up got one of the other side—­and so on for an hour.  Most delicious of all was a white-haired German, once colonel in the Hanoverian Legion which was settled in the Eastern Province, and which to this day remains the loyallest of her Majesty’s subjects.  When the Speaker ruled against his side he counselled defiance in a resounding whisper; when an opponent was speaking he snorted thunderous derision; when an opponent retorted he smiled blandly and admonished him:  “Ton’t lose yer demper.”

In the Assembly, if nowhere else, rumbled the menace of coming war.

One other feature there was that was not Capetown.  Along Adderley Street, before the steamship companies’ offices, loafed a thick string of sun-reddened, unshaven, flannel-shirted, corduroy-trousered British working-men.  Inside the offices they thronged the counters six deep.  Down to the docks they filed steadily with bundles to be penned in the black hulls of homeward liners.  Their words were few and sullen.  These were the miners of the Rand—­who floated no companies, held no shares, made no fortunes, who only wanted to make a hundred pounds to furnish a cottage and marry a girl.

They had been turned out of work, packed in cattle-trucks, and had come down in sun by day and icy wind by night, empty-bellied, to pack off home again.  Faster than the ship-loads could steam out the trainloads steamed in.  They choked the lodging-houses, the bars, the streets.  Capetown was one huge demonstration of the unemployed.  In the hotels and streets wandered the pale, distracted employers.  They hurried hither and thither and arrived nowhither; they let their cigars go out, left their glasses half full, broke off their talk in the middle of a word.  They spoke now of intolerable grievance and hoarded revenge, now of silent mines, rusting machinery, stolen gold.  They held their houses in Johannesburg as gone beyond the reach of insurance.  They hated Capetown, they could not tear themselves away to England, they dared not return to the Rand.

This little quiet corner of Capetown held the throbbing hopes and fears of all Johannesburg and more than half the two Republics and the mass of all South Africa.

None doubted—­though many tried to doubt—­that at last it was—­war!  They paused an instant before they said the word, and spoke it softly.  It had come at last—­the moment they had worked and waited for—­and they knew not whether to exult or to despair.

II.

The army corps—­has not left England!

     A little patch of white tents—­A dream of distance—­the desert of
     the Karroo—­war at last—­A campaign without headquarters—­waiting
     for the army corps.