My friend, Mr. Richard Harding Davis, went to South Africa in complete sympathy with the British cause, and joined General Buller’s army, seeing much of the hardest campaigning on the Natal side. He was fully convinced as to the rights of the English cause, and equally firm in his opinion that the Boers were all they had been depicted by the press of Great Britain. A little later he had occasion to withdraw from the British forces and transfer his observations to the opposite side. He did so with the full consent of the British authorities, and without unfriendly disagreement. He had not been with the Afrikanders very long before he was persuaded of their cause, seeing how grossly they had been misrepresented by men who wrote without knowledge of the true state of affairs, or who wrote in revenge after having been crossed in some manner by the Transvaal authorities. Mr. Davis saw that the men of these two South African Republics were not the dirty, ignorant, bewhiskered settlers that had been pictured, but that they were clubmen, professional men, and business men of every description and many nationalities, as well as the typical farmers of the veldt known to illustrated papers, and they were all fighting in a just cause and defending their rights against territorial aggression. This was also, I am safe in saying, the impression of all the correspondents who had the opportunity of observing the war from the Boer side, no matter how warm had been their early prejudice in favor of Great Britain. Mr. Davis went to the war as heartily prejudiced in favor of the British officers as of the cause of England; but because he has had sufficient strength of character and love of fair play to change his sentiments and the tenor of his writing completely, he has been malignantly attacked for making the same statement that I have just made regarding the personal conduct of the British officers. Nevertheless, this statement is a fact that remains absolutely true. It seems incredible that such demeanor could have been manifested, and I am free to confess that had I not been a witness I would not have believed it. [Illustration: Lieutenant-General N. A. Miles, U. S. A.]