One of our daily patrolling parties returned on the 19th with a boy and a couple Hottentot women prisoners. They had been robbing a neighbouring farm, and were caught returning to the Waterkloof with their skin-sacks filled with half-ripe fruit and vegetables. We got out of them on cross-examination, that on the day of their last attack, when we pursued them with twenty horsemen only, that they had five Kaffirs killed on the field, and nine others, Kaffirs and Totties, wounded, several of whom had since died. We also learned that the enemy were meditating an attack upon us that night or the night following. In consequence of this warning, the truth of which there was no reason to doubt, we brought the cattle within walls at sunset, doubled the sentries after tattoo, and kept a sharp look out. About midnight the silence was gradually broken by the cries of night-hawks and hyænas, and the barking of jackals answering each other far and near round the walls, which, however, were in reality the signals of savages apprising their confederates of our unexpected state of preparation. After a time, the sounds, so admirably imitated, grew less frequent, till they died away altogether. The morning showed us the soft ground marked on three sides of the fort with the prints of bare feet and veldt schoenen. Every evening we continued to be visited by most appalling storms of thunder and lightning, but generally without rain. The continued peals rolled and echoed in a most imposing manner among the surrounding mountains. A Hottentot boy was killed one afternoon by the lightning. Christmas Day had now come round, but instead of snow outside, and a roaring fire within, it was a roasting, broiling midsummer day, too hot to stir till after sunset, when we sat on the stoep unbonnetted and in shirt sleeves, smoking far into the night, listening to the shrill chirp of the cicada and piping of the bullfrog, and talking of home and distant friends. We had neither wine nor grog to drink to their health and happiness, but pledged them cordially in coffee. The Boers reporting a body of rebels to be living in one of the deserted farms of the Koonap valley, we set out with a party of mounted men to look them up; but, as far as the object of our ride was concerned, we had our trouble for nothing. We went round the foot of the hills by an extremely difficult path, along the face of a steep declivity overhanging the rocky bed of the river; up steep shingly ascents, and down steps or ledges of rock four or five feet deep, our horses jumping nimbly down after us, as none but Cape horses could. The farm was tenantless, and still as death, though there was plenty of spoor quite fresh; a small fire was still smouldering in one of the roofless chambers, and the ground under the fruit trees, which were perfectly stripped, was thickly trampled. The rebels had decamped, and were probably looking down on us from the mountain crags above.