Certain of meeting Sir Garnet at Coomassie, he departed without provisions, and, after a rough ride of eleven miles through a wild and terrible country, he found himself when night fell at a village seven miles distant from it. There strange and startling rumours prevailed among the women, for the men had all gone elsewhere. Coomassie, they told him, was no more, and its destroyers had departed. Captain Sartorius sent messengers to Captain Glover, stating that Sir Garnet would only be a day's march off, and could easily be overtaken; but these messengers were fired on in the bush, and no tidings reached the naval officer. Moving on with caution, next day Sartorius approached Coomassie, which was still shrouded in clouds of dark smoke, amid which the red flames were smouldering, and was met by a woman, who informed him that 'the king and all his young warriors were in the town raging over its destruction, and vowing vengeance for it.' Three houses alone had escaped the conflagration. Aware that scant mercy would be shown to him and his twenty brave followers if taken, he quickly left that place of horrors behind him. Believing that he was now equi-distant between Captain Glover and Sir Garnet, he bravely resolved to follow up the latter, a fortunate circumstance for the luckless Jerry Wilmot, who was found in the very track his party was pursuing. 'Come, my good friend,' said he, after he had heard Jerry's story in a few words, 'you must pull yourself together and make an effort, as we must push on without a moment's delay.' An effort--yes, thought Jerry gleefully, though he was weak, faint, and feverish, for his adventures in the moist and pestiferous bush were telling on him now. But for the advent of Captain Sartorius, what must his fate inevitably have been? He was mounted on the horse of a messenger, who had been shot in the bush, and now rode on with his rescuers. The sheet of water which had barred his way so long they forded, the water rising to their saddle-girths, and then they pushed on, hoping to reach the bridge constructed by our engineers across the Ordah. It had been swept away! But the waters which destroyed it had subsided, and where that waste of water, so troublesome to our troops, once rolled, the ground was dry and even hard, but the odours that loaded the air from the bodies of the slain Ashantees lying in the bush, left Captain Sartorius and his companions in no doubt of their being on the line of march followed by Sir Garnet Wolseley. Poor Jerry had felt himself like one in an evil dream when he found his limbs so powerless that he was incapable of resistance and sinking on the earth. Now he felt also in a dream, and could scarcely realise that he was mounted, with friends and on the homeward way, for he was half dead with weakness, and, if not rescued when he was, he must have succumbed very soon after. Keenly had he realised the fact that 'Past and to come seem best, things present worst.'