There has been some delay about our pay lately, and some of the sisters who were lodging here had not received any since they left England, so were not able to pay their mess bills, and I had to pay various mess accounts when I got back from my run up-country, and began to feel rather anxious as to whether I could go on feeding my large party of sisters; but now the pay has turned up, so we have got straight again; and the Government give us various allowances--Colonial allowance, and for mess, servants, fuel, &c., so we are feeling rather well off. We are much enjoying a big package of papers that the Red Cross Society now send up to us each week; whole weeks of _Times_, _Daily Mail_, _Daily Graphic_, _Daily Telegraph_, _Standard_, _Illustrated London News_, _Army and Navy_, &c. They are the greatest boon to the whole camp. The men point out to me the "pretty boys" in the illustrated papers when they see any pictures of soldiers, as, by comparison, they all look so thin and rough out here. XXXVI PINETOWN, NATAL, _September 1900_. Now we are really getting busy again. Patients keep arriving, sometimes small parties, sometimes large. Early in September we admitted thirteen men who had been prisoners in Pretoria for nine months. They were very weak and run down, and so happy to be here; when I took them their first basket of fruit, they simply wolfed it down, as they had seen no fruit since they went up-country. Then we had rather a "difficult" batch of officers sent down from Mooi River. They have no officers' wards there, so these men had been quartered in a hotel more than a mile from the hospital, where each had his own room and servant, and they seem to have ordered and done just what they liked. Up to now we have never had more than three or four officers well enough to sit up to meals at one time, as they have always come to us really ill, and as soon as they were well enough they have either rushed back to the front or have been sent home on the hospital ships; but with these officers from Mooi River (none of them very ill), I suddenly found that we had twenty-four sick officers in, and that _sixteen_ of them were well enough to sit up to meals, and that it was not suitable for them to eat in the ward where there were a few men still very ill; so, eventually, a large tent had to be rigged up for them, and as it was a long way from the kitchen there was some difficulty in getting the food to them hot.