scouts, as they persistently rode in rear of the Cape cart. The road too, was infamous, but it was impossible to lose the way as the column had left an unmistakable track behind them, and this was fortunate, because when we had been going about an hour and a half our intelligent guide stated he didn’t know the way. I wonder how Keeley felt all that Tuesday. If he could have heard half we said he would have torn his two days’ beard out and wept. The other scout lost us altogether. Keeley and Weil were arranging a series of despatch riders, so as long as we got one of them to Jan Modebi’s, it didn’t much matter. We outspanned first at a rebel’s farm, and had an excellent lunch. I was still rather fretful. The prospect of captivity made me so, and I only believe in dead Dutchmen, till peace is proclaimed. One Sonnenberg, a brother of some Bond member or other, was there trading, I suppose, like most Bondsmen, running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He looked well on it, and was very civil. We inspanned and then came a long trek to Jan Modebi’s. About half-way there, we saw two horsemen with guns cruising about. One obviously was not a soldier. I reckoned Pretoria was the ticket, however, they came up and Weil went to interview them. They turned out to be one of the Kimberley Light Horse and a civilian who was showing him the way, and he said he had got a convoy of cattle. It felt like being near home again then. We afterwards met the convoy--total, four white men and five black. I still marvel at their colossal impudence, marching through a rebel country within five miles of the enemy’s border, escorting cattle for which any Boer will peril his skin. He calmly assured me they were going to pick up all they saw on the way; to use his own words, "All is fish that comes to our net." I hope they got through all right. So to Mr. Menson’s, where we put up for the night, and he, like everyone else, did all he could. He, too, had had a bad time. He didn’t grumble, but when the relief column had come through they had cut all his barbed wire fences. Having a constitutional antipathy to barbed wire I sympathized with the relief column, but naturally did not say so. I was amused to see three prints of Sir Alfred Milner, Lord Roberts, and Oom Paul, the inscription under the latter being, "The end is better than the beginning, 14.10.99," also to hear his account of how when driving his cattle to Vryburg at the outbreak of the war he had met a Dutchman who told him that they had driven the English into the sea. His reply was, "Oh, that’s too far to go," and so he turned and drove his cattle back again to his farm. Weil, as usual, bought up cattle, &c., also butter and other luxuries, and despatched them to the hospital at Mafeking on his own account.