difficulty in conveying his wounded (fortunately but few), and the captured women and children. These captives were, on this account, offered their freedom, but refused to accept it, which, perhaps, was not unnatural, seeing that their homes and crops were destroyed, and they had no longer any means of livelihood. The force passed through the Intombi Valley, laying the country waste for miles on either side of the road as it went, and met on its way messengers from Colonel Wood, requesting the immediate presence of the mounted corps. But upon the 23rd February, Colonel Rowlands received a memorandum to the effect that the Lieut.-General, by desire of the High Commissioner, wished him to proceed at once back to Pretoria, to prepare some defence against the Boers, who had assumed a threatening attitude. Upon the receipt of this order he quitted the Luneburg district, and arrived on the 6th of March at the capital of the Transvaal. Here there were but 200 infantry and some few mounted volunteers; but by Colonel Rowlands’s exertions the number was soon swelled to 600 or 700, by the addition of city corps and other volunteers. A considerable number of Boers who had never willingly accepted the annexation of their country by the English, had taken the opportunity, offered by the general confusion which reigned after the disaster of the 22nd January, of endeavouring to regain the independence of their state. Mass meetings were held to discuss the subject, and finally a large body of armed men formed a camp at no great distance from Pretoria. The situation appeared a very serious one; and the High Commissioner himself travelled to Pretoria to endeavour by his honeyed words to calm an agitation which might prove so singularly inconvenient should the angry feelings of the indignant Boers find vent in blows. On the 12th of April, just two years from the day of the annexation, Sir B. Frere met a deputation of the Transvaal farmers at Erasmus Spruit, about six miles from Pretoria, and held a long discussion with them upon the subject of their rights and wrongs. They repeatedly and plainly asserted that Sir T. Shepstone had coerced the people into submission by threatening them with the Zulus, and declared unanimously that nothing would satisfy them but the recovery of their liberties. Sir Bartle Frere gave them to understand in return that this was the only thing for which they might not hope. He assured them that he looked upon the _voortrekkers_ as an honour to their race, and that he felt proud to belong to the same stock. The Queen, he told them, felt for them “as for her own children;”[160] and he hoped to tell her that she had “no better subjects in her empire,” than amongst them. The committee, however, retired in complete dissatisfaction, and addressed a petition to Her Majesty, in which they remark, “unwilling subjects but faithful neighbours we will be;” and more than hint that they are