After these adventures it has become a sort of prodigal son, a legendary weapon beloved of those great children we call the Boers. It is, therefore, no small honour to be called upon to escort _Long Tom_. We share this honour with a gunner named Erasmus, a strange being, who, after being severely wounded at the taking of ’his cannon,’ had sworn only to return and fight in its company. On this Monday night, accordingly, at eleven o’clock, in a downpour of rain, we and our horses take our places in the train, which, profiting no doubt by its being a ’special,’ starts an hour after time. It consists of three or four first-class coaches with lateral corridors. These coaches, which are comfortable enough, and very high in the ceiling, have in each compartment two seats of three places each, covered with leather, and in the centre a folding-table about 50 centimetres wide. At night a second seat, which is raised in the day-time, or serves as a luggage-net, makes a sleeping-berth, so that four travellers in each compartment can rest comfortably, a convenience highly desirable in a country where journeys often last forty-eight hours, and even six or seven days, as from Cape Town to Buluwayo and Fort Salisbury. Travellers install themselves as they please, without any sort of constraint. Luggage is not registered, and the carriages are invaded--I use the term advisedly--with weapons, saddles, bridles, bandoliers, provisions, dogs, if one has any, rugs, trunks and bundles. No officials, no staff, no warning cries, no notices forbidding travellers to get out while the train is in motion. A station-master, and hardly anything more. A bell rung three times at short intervals announces the departure of the train. You get in, or you don’t get in; you stand on the footboard, climb on to the roof of the carriage, leave the door open or shut it, get into a truck or cattle-van--it’s your own look out. You are free, and no one would dream of interfering with you in the matter. In the carriages passengers sleep, drink, eat, sing, shoot and gamble, and every morning a negro comes and cleans up. There is a little of everything among the debris--old papers, empty preserve-tins, fruit-parings, tobacco-ash, cartridge-cases, empty, and sometimes broken, bottles. An inspector on the P. L. M. would go mad at the sight. While the cleaning goes on, we go and ask for a little hot water from the engine, and make our morning coffee. On trucks that we go and fetch ourselves we load up heavy carts of provisions, ammunition, and cannon. Finally, we heap up pell-mell in open cattle-vans, mules and horses in some, oxen in another. And casualties are no more numerous than in Europe, where we arrange them like sardines in a box--’thirty-two men, eight horses.’ The beasts of these regions, like the men, have apparently learnt to take care of themselves from their earliest infancy.