Every pause in our talk was filled by the sound of deep, loud chanting coming from a tent hard by. Presently I went out to see them at their evening service. A big tent was full of men squatting around, the short twilight was fast darkening into night outside, and the interior of the tent was lit by two candles stuck in the necks of bottles. Except a couple of old men, they were all in the prime of life, and a splendidly strong-looking set of fellows they were. They sang, without any drawl or nasal intonation, straight out from their deep chests. The chant rose and fell with a swinging solemnity. There was little of pleading or supplication in its tones; they were calling on the God of Battles; the God of the Old Testament rather than the Preacher of the Sermon on the Mount was He to whom they sang; and sometimes there was a strain of almost stern demand about it that gave it more the ring of a war-song than a prayer. Entering the door of that tent seemed like going into another century. It could not be but luminously evident to the onlooker that these men were calling on an unseen Power whose actual existence was as real to their minds as that of their Mauser rifles stacked around the tent-pole. One could not help contrasting this obvious sincerity with the perfunctory church parade on our side, and this religion with that of two-thirds or three-fourths of our army of careless agnostics. Barring a very small minority, principally Irishmen, there is no place for religion in Tommy's intellectual kit. It has just degenerated into being an old magazine from which he draws his swear-words--a sort of bandolier of blasphemy. It was hot in that tent, and the sweat made the foreheads of these deep-voiced choristers shine against the dark shadows cast behind them on the canvas. It was curious to notice how the knees and elbows of their clothes showed signs of wear from their favourite shooting attitude, and there were many with buttons missing from their waistcoats that had been scraped off by the stones on the kopjes, or with buttons of different patterns that had evidently been sewn on by the wearers in place of those worn off. All the Boers appear to give up shaving when on the warpath, which adds to the wild picturesqueness of their appearance. I found the hymns they were singing were old Dutch ones. "We keep this up every night in camp," one of them said to me, "just the same as at home." When they had finished, they all lit their pipes, and then I was put through a catechism, which was the same at every camp or with every group of Boers I met for the next week. "What did I think of the Boers?" "Did I not expect to meet a lot of savages?" "Was I not surprised to hear them speaking English?" And then they were everywhere keen to learn if we appreciated the way our prisoners were being treated in Pretoria, and equally curious to know our opinion of how they were fighting. As I thought the siege of Ladysmith, since