Life in camp is an enjoyable business so long as the weather continues fine and not too boisterous; discipline is relaxed to a certain extent while under canvas, open-air life renders the appetite keener, and one’s enjoyment of life is more thorough than is the case in barracks. Wet weather, however, changes all this. The luxury of floor-boards is a rare one even in a standing camp, and, no matter what one may do in the way of digging trenches round the tent and draining off surplus water by all possible means, a moist unpleasantness renders life a burden and causes equipment and arms to need about twice as much cleaning as under normal circumstances. Camp life breeds yarns unending, and in wet weather, or in the hours after dark, men sit and tell hirsute chestnuts to each other for lack of better occupation. If the weather is fine there are plenty of varieties of sport, including the ubiquitous football to occupy spare minutes, but yarns and tobacco form the principal solace of hours which cannot be filled in more active ways. There is one yarn which, like all yarns, has the merit of being perfectly true, but, unlike most, is not nearly so well known as it ought to be. It concerns a cavalry regiment which settled down for a brief space at Potchefstroom after the signing of peace in South Africa. Some months previous to the signing of peace, a certain lieutenant of this regiment, known to his men and his fellow officers as “Bulgy,” became possessed of a young baboon, which grew and throve exceedingly at the end of a stout chain that secured the captive to one of the transport wagons of the regiment. Bulgy’s servant was entrusted with the care of the monkey, which, after the manner of baboons, was a competent thief from infancy, and inclined to be savage if thwarted. On one occasion, in particular, Bulgy’s monkey got loose, and got at the officers’ mess wagon; it had a good feed of biscuits and other delicacies, and retired at length, followed by the mess caterer, who expostulated violently both with Bulgy’s servant and with Bulgy’s monkey, until a tin of ox-tongues skilfully aimed by the monkey caught him below the belt and winded him. After that, as Bret Harte says, the subsequent proceedings interested him no more. Well, the regiment arrived at Potchefstroom and settled down under canvas, with an average of eight men to a tent and the horse lines of each troop placed at right-angles to the lines of tents. Bulgy’s monkey was given a place away on the outside of the lines, with the other end of his chain attached to a tree-stump, and there, for a time, he rested, fed sparingly and abused plentifully by Bulgy’s servant. In the regiment itself money was plentiful at the time, and it was the custom in the tents which housed drinking men for the eight tent-mates to get in a can of beer before the canteen closed. Over the beer they would sit and yarn and play cards until “lights out” sounded.