Some of the hospital fittings had been put ashore at Cape Town and not yet sent on, and more of the necessaries were still down at Durban, so that it was very difficult to push on the building work; and all the time we knew the Field Hospitals were crowded up, and needing to send men down to us to give them a chance of recovery; and we heard that the generals said they could not fight any more till they could clear the Field Hospitals. All the cases of stores were numbered, so that when we wanted any particular thing, we had to look up in the list the number of its case, and then hunt about till we found that number; all day long it was "Have you seen 4507?"--"No, I want 5470." Sometimes we found a lot of jugs, and then could not find the basins; sometimes a lot of saucers, and no cups; and it seemed as though we never should get order out of the chaos. At first we had no house-boys, and the orderlies were all busy carrying the building materials up, so Sister and I kept the bedrooms tidy, and the medical officers (in return) carried the water for the baths! As soon as I could, I annexed a fine old Kaffir as a house-boy, and "John" is a great stand-by now. We tried first of all to fit up rooms with the bare necessary furniture for the rest of the officers and sisters, so that they could all come up and help us. If you saw the jetty at Durban you would wonder that any stores ever got sent up to their right destination; literally hundreds of tons of boxes stacked up in hopeless confusion. Durban is a bit overdone by military requirements, and quite run out of some stores. On April 3rd we were made very anxious by a strong rumour that Mafeking had fallen. They say that _all_ the little children have died there. Yesterday we heard of the loss of a British convoy and five guns, and also that the Boers were going into laager again quite near to where Cronje was taken. Durban is full of refugees, and of Ladysmith people recruiting after the siege. I went over one of the hospital ships, the _Lismore Castle_, before I came up here, and it was melancholy to see the _skeletons_ from Ladysmith; one quite young fellow told me he had come here from India, got typhoid soon after the siege began, then, as soon as he began to convalesce, the only food they could give him was mealy meal and a little horse-flesh, so he got dysentery. He is now mending, but it is slow work with them all. Before we came, our rooms had been occupied by refugees, and fleas abound; I catch about six _ter die_ and once in the night. Luckily we are fairly free from mosquitoes. It is awfully hot, and the medical officers go about in trousers and vests only: we wish we could wear as little! This is a very scrappy letter; we work from 6 A.M. to dusk, and then I have been scribbling a little before turning in, but I am weary to a degree, and must fill up the gaps in my next. XXVIII