A vast amount of trouble and of energy was thrown away by all concerned, while the few whose eyes were open from the first stood by and watched to see what would come of it. The question remains unanswered to this day. That the annexation of the Transvaal by Sir Garnet Wolseley did _not_ come of it, is to that discreet general’s great credit. And had his decision—that the work which he was specially sent out to do[42] was one for which the country was not ripe, and would not be for many years—been accepted and acted upon by England, the expense of his six months’ progress through Natal would have been well worth incurring indeed, for in that case there would have been no Zulu War. But this, unfortunately for all parties, was not the case. The popular answer in Natal to the question, “What did Sir Garnet Wolseley do for you?” is, “He got us up an hour earlier in the morning;” an excellent thing truly, but a costly hour, the history of which is as follows: For many years the city of Pietermaritzburg, known as “Sleepy Hollow” to its rivals of another and, in its own opinion, a busier town, had set all its clocks and watches, and regulated all its business hours by the sound of a gun, fired daily from Fort Napier at nine o’clock A.M., the signal for which came from the town itself. The gun was frequently credited with being too fast or slow by a few seconds or even minutes, and on one occasion was known to have been wrong by half-an-hour; a mistake which was remedied in the most original fashion, by setting the gun back a minute and a half daily till it should have returned to the proper time; to the utter confusion of all the chronometers in the neighbourhood. But, right or wrong, the nine-o’clock gun was the regulator of city time, including that of all country places within reach of its report. The natives understood it, and “gun-fire” was their universal hour of call; the shops were opened at its sound, and but little business done before it. But during Sir Garnet Wolseley’s reign in Natal it occurred, not without reason, to the member of his staff whom he placed in temporary authority over the postal and other arrangements of the colony, that nine o’clock was too late for a struggling community to begin its day, and he therefore altered the original hour of gun-fire to that of eight A.M. How far the alteration really changed the habits of the people it is hard to say, or how many of them may now let the eight-o’clock gun wake them instead of sending them to work, but the change remains an actual public proof of the fact that in 1875 Sir Garnet Wolseley visited Natal.