I think there are about 500 beds here, nearly all under canvas. There are a few buildings of wood, and amongst them is a small room that the sisters use as a duty room, and the night sisters (two of them) sit there, and they have a small stove for boiling water, &c. There is no arrangement for hot water near the tents for the patients--we used to have (and I have seen them in other hospitals too) boilers on wheels with a coolie to keep the fire going, and if the water was not always hot, the coolie soon heard about it from the orderlies. One day the C.O. asked me whether I had everything I wanted, and I said, "No, I wanted a good many things for the men, one being hot water"; but he said he had never heard of these movable boilers, and seemed to think them an unnecessary luxury. At the sisters' camp we have a comfortable room that they use as a sitting-room, with a mixed lot of furniture that has been "commandeered" from houses in the district. The other day an officer sent us a lot of china plates taken from a Boer hotel; they were very welcome, as we were most of us using enamel plates out of our tea-baskets, &c. We have our meals in a tent--just a long table, and benches without backs. Our sleeping tents are chiefly the big square kind, called E. P. tents; they are supposed to hold four beds, so we may have to pack tight, but at present Sister and I are alone. Some of the sisters have made their tents very nice, and have rigged up curtains to divide them. At present we use our boxes as washstand, &c., and as a General Hospital is given a certain amount of furniture for the sisters, we intend not to buy anything that is not really necessary until we see what they are going to give us. XLIII GENERAL HOSPITAL, NATAL, _March 1901_. Now I have waded (both literally and figuratively) through my first spell of a fortnight on night duty, and it has not been pleasant; but when one thinks how much worse it must be for the troops out trekking, one does not mind. I have always thought that South Africa _without the sun_ was rather a poor sort of a place, and, living in a tent in the wet season, I am confirmed in that opinion. It began to rain the first night I went on duty, and during the fortnight I had only four fine nights: the other nights it rained--generally in bucketfuls.