"Things are going on as usual. Every one is heartily sick and tired of the siege. Colonel Plumer, with 1500 men, is only about thirty-five miles away, with provisions for us.... Every one here feels the want of more, better, and varied food. A friend of ours was very ill for ten days, and the only comforts the doctor could order were two tins of milk and some lunch biscuits! There is no margarine left in the town, and the Commissariat Department is calling in all the starch. The hospital is very full; and there is a good deal of malarial and typhoid fever.... Sometimes the bread is awful, black, and made from locally-crushed oats, with all the husks on, simply split in long pieces. We are all downright hungry, and cannot buy a bit of food, except on some special occasion. Last Sunday Weil's store was allowed to sell certain articles of food, _e.g._ pea flour and margarine; former, 2s. 6d. a tin; latter, 3s. per lb. The crush outside the store was so great that women fainted, and some were waiting for hours, and then unable to get in.... The railings of the park and tennis-courts are used for firing, and we are authorised to use our fences for the same purpose. Our meat is good, but poor and tough. We almost entirely depend upon the natives looting enemy's cattle, and sometimes we have horse-flesh, but that I cannot manage, so on those days I am hungrier than ever.... My husband is quarter-master-sergeant in charge of the rations--not a very enviable billet. The whole town is on rations. We are all under martial law, and Colonel Baden-Powell looks after us all, and we may be very thankful that the defence of Mafeking has been entrusted to such a capable man." The menu was not variegated. You took your choice between a species of porridge (made from the husks of oats fermented for some hours prior to boiling) and a noxious brown biscuit, or, as the Indians called it, "chupattie." But it had none of the savouriness of the chupattie, and was described as a cross between a ship's biscuit and a baked brick. It was certainly filling at the price, so filling, in fact, that those who devoured it suffered from what was styled "hippopotamus on the chest" for some hours afterwards.