Returning, however, to the description of my trip of 1881; when I got to the hotel I found all prepared for leaving, and after breakfast we started for Newcastle, intending to rest at Ingogo, as we had not time to visit Laing’s Nek (and moreover we could see the position from the road), where Colley’s first defeat took place on Jan. 28th, with a loss of 260 killed and wounded, and where Colonel Deane and Major Poole (Cetywayo’s old friend) were shot down. After a pleasant drive we crossed the Ingogo drift, the road gradually ascending until the plateau of Schuin’s Hooghte was reached, where Colley suffered his second defeat on Feb. 7th. Making a _reconnaissance_ that morning with 273 of the 60th Rifles and 38 men of the mounted squadron from Mount Prospect, Colley was virtually lured to his destruction. The Boers retired before his advance, until having decoyed our troops to Schuin’s Hooghte, a high and perfectly unsheltered plateau, they opened a galling fire from the other side of the valley which intervened, a perfectly safe position for them. This was at 10:15 A. M., and until sundown our soldiers were nothing more or less than English targets for Dutch bullets. The field guns which Colley brought with him were useless; he had nothing to fire at but rocks, the Boers finding most excellent cover. The horses were shot down at the guns, the mules at the ambulance wagons, nothing living was safe for a moment from the Boers’ unerring aim. Maclean pointed out to me the exact stone, near the centre of the plateau, where Colley, Essex and Wilkinson took cover most of the day, and gave me a most vivid description of the field when, on a second visit next day, he found the place literally stormed by armies of cowardly vultures, attracted by the putrid effluvium from the rotting carcasses of the dead horses and mules. With my penknife I picked out splashes of lead from the crevices of the stones, as relics of the Boers’ accurate sighting. Wilkinson, brave young fellow, was drowned the same night in the Ingogo, when pluckily returning with comforts for the wounded, that river having become a sweeping torrent owing to the storm of rain which had been raging for some hours previous.