Forward, fighting, smoking, chewing, With a heart for any fate, Still achieving, still pursuing, And arriving--_just too late_. I fled. INVITATIONS--AND A CONCERT. _Wednesday, February 6th, 1901._ Another week has rolled away; a week's march nearer home anyway, and like the great MacMahon, I am here and here I sticks. The most thrilling event of the past seven days has been the sudden and unexpected reception of mails, after having abandoned all hope, and a parcel which arrived in Pretoria for me during the first week in September. I was interested to read in an enclosed note that my aunt hoped I should be home to spend Christmas with her. By-the-bye, people have been awfully good in sending me invitations to weddings, funerals, and christenings. In August last I was the recipient of a dainty invitation to the wedding of a friend. The sad event was to take place in June. I didn't go. The latest was a cream-laid affair, from another quarter, on which I was requested in letters of gold to honour certain near and dear relatives with my presence at the christening of their firstborn. As the affair was to take place in December, and I received the pressing invitation at the end of January--I was again unable to be present at another interesting ceremony. I have also received several invitations to Terpsichorean revels. My R.S.V.P. has been curtly to the effect that "Mr. P.T.R. is not dancing this season." As regards deaths and funerals, I have seen and attended more than enough of them out here. At this present moment a friend, a New Zealander, is in parlous plight. He was shot in the right shoulder, the wound soon healed, but the arm was almost useless, so the massage fiend here used to come and give him terrible gip. Then doctor No. 3 came along, said he had been treated wrongly, that the artery was severed, etc., and operated on him. The operation itself was successful, but as regards other matters, it is touch and go with him, his arm is black up to a little above the elbow, in places it is ebony, and, I understand, amputation, if the worse comes to the worst, is almost out of the question. So, with others, I go in to keep him cheered up, and chaff him over the champagne and other luxuries he is on, suggesting what a lovely black eye his ebony right mawler might give a fellow, and feeling all the time a strong inclination to do a sob. He is such a rattling fine fellow, indeed, all the Colonials I have met are.[9] [Footnote 9: Since my return I have heard from "Scotty," as we used to call him. He wrote from his home in New Zealand, his right arm had been successfully amputated, and he was getting accustomed to its loss.]