WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA--ARABI PASHA'S REBELLION IN EGYPT--TEL-EL-KEBIR--MARRIAGE--LIFE IN CAIRO. Shortly after Captain Wauchope's return home from Cyprus another opportunity for foreign service presented itself in South Africa, and he lost no time in offering himself to the War Office. He was accepted for staff duty, and received a commission to go out at once. So limited was the time given him for preparation that he had not even an opportunity to go to Aldershot, where his baggage was lying, to make up his kit, but he telegraphed from London to the quartermaster of the regiment--Captain Forbes--to throw him in a small kit into a bullock-trunk and forward it to Southampton at once, as he was off to South Africa next day. [Sidenote: The Transvaal] The country had drifted almost unconsciously into a trouble which has since cost so much in loss of life and treasure. The South African Republic, or the Transvaal, was founded some sixty or seventy years ago by Boer farmers from Cape Colony, who, being dissatisfied with British rule and its interference with them and their peculiar notions as to slavery, sought to establish an independent state for themselves where they might without hindrance carry out their ideas as they pleased. They, in fact, sought liberty {69} to make the natives their slaves. Conflicts were, of course, the natural outcome of their attempts to acquire the land beyond the Vaal; but notwithstanding this, the new settlers in 1840 were so far established in possession, and their numbers had so much increased, that they formed themselves into a Republic for mutual protection. At that time the possibilities of the future importance of this part of South Africa, or indeed of our colonies there, were not sufficiently realised by either our Government or our people at home. Neither the Transvaal Republic nor the Boers seemed to be any concern of ours. It was left to a few Scotch missionaries such as Moffat, Livingstone, Stewart, and Mackenzie to make these known, and to endeavour to educate and civilise the degraded natives in the science of social life and in the truths of Christianity. In this effort they met from the first the virulent opposition of the Boer settlers, who neither wanted the natives to be educated nor to be Christianised.