The inhabitants were very pleased with their own ingenuity, and in their ordnance workshops the manufacture of shot and shell went on apace. The mechanics of the railway works, by a system which seemed to act on the lines of a conjuring trick, turned out from the shell-factory about fifty rounds a day. No waste was allowed. Even the fragments of the enemy's shells were utilised. These and scraps of cast iron were purchased at twopence a pound for smelting, and twopence, it must be remembered, was now a magnificent disbursement, as money was growing more and more scarce. Curiously enough, the present foreman, Conolly, was at one time manager of the shell department of the ordnance factory at Pretoria, where he personally supervised the manufacture of the larger shells. He now necessarily took a parental interest in the shells flung into Mafeking by the Boers' Creusot gun, and also in those new ones that were flung out of Mafeking as a result of his own and others' inventive genius! A good deal of shelling took place, and that on the 23rd was said to be a salute in honour of Independence Day in the Orange Free State. The inhabitants of Mafeking would not have grudged their enemies the, to them, distressing attempt at festivity had they then known that four days later the death-blow of that independence would be struck, and the salute was destined to be the last in the history of the Republics! Fare was growing more and more meagre. Horse-flesh was diversified by bread made from horse forage; water, to say the least of it, was becoming interesting only to bacteriologists. The native population for the most part starved; they now and then indulged in a raid and brought back fat fare, which for a day or two had a visible effect upon their ebon skeletons, but they brought it at the risk of their lives. Uninterrupted deluges of rain made existence a perpetual misery, the trenches and also the bomb-proof shelters were flooded, and the hapless inhabitants, saturated, fled into the open, uncertain whether death by fire was not preferable to death by water. The first, at all events, promised to be expeditious, while the second offered prospects of prolonged sousing and exquisite tortures of enduring rheumatism. Daily the state of affairs became less tolerable. Typhoid and malaria stalked abroad, and in the children's and women's laager diphtheria had set in.