There was much excitement here one night. A major arrived, sick, in a mule buggy from a column near here; the C.O. saw him, and told him what tent to go to, but he never arrived. After much searching of the camp, neither the officer nor his mules could be found; then the heliograph was set to work, and eventually he was located at the next station, and when he was brought back he said the C.O. was so rude to him that he thought he would not stay, and had gone to a hotel! Since I came off night duty I, and two other sisters, have been doing only "afternoon duty," which means looking after the camp while all the other sisters are off duty; this is because there are more sisters here than the proper number: if there were only the right number, two of the sisters who have lines would stay on every afternoon in turn; but the stupid thing about it is that if we were each turned on to a big tent of enterics (instead of one sister having all the line on her hands) we might be doing really useful nursing; as it is, there is not much to do in the afternoon, beyond prowling round and trying to talk to the men and cheer them up a bit. The other day one of them presented me with these lines of his own composition; he was in a tent when I was on night duty where there was a very bad case: (_By an Australian Trooper._) You may talk of our Soldiers and Sailors, Of our brave Colonials too, But nothing is thought of our Nurses, With hearts so tender and true. They have suffered great hardships, and endured The trials that fell to their share, And so caused their names to be cherished On every Barrack Room Square. So give three cheers for our Sisters Who've shown us what they will do To help the cause of Old England By nursing our sick soldiers through. XLIV GENERAL HOSPITAL, NATAL, _April 1901_. Our tent has filled up now--four of us in it--so we feel rather tightly packed. One of the four is a sister who has been in India, and done some camping out, so she thinks she knows all about tents and how to live in them; we rather trade on this, and when it rains we assure her she ought to go round and slack the guy-ropes in case they should shrink with the wet and pull the pegs up, as she knows so much more about how to do it than we do; or if it comes on to blow in the night we wake her up, and offer her the hammer to go round and knock in the tent-pegs! The wind gets up so suddenly here that we have to be careful not to leave anything about that is not tethered, or it may be miles away over the veldt before we wake up. I now have charge of a medical line of tents, and find the work very interesting, though there are many difficulties to contend with.