wind, and they went to sleep supperless because the transport, delayed by many causes, had not come up. No alarms or excursions disturbed their rest that night, but their march next morning was to the accompaniment of distant pom-poms and heavier guns and the sounds of fighting not far off. They did not know the meaning of it all then. It seemed to them but a local skirmish, and not the penultimate phase of a great movement in which Ian Hamilton, French, and Rundle had been sweeping the Boers before them from Wepener to Thaba ’Nchu and thence eastward and northward, clearing the country for a still greater movement. No shots came near the marching column. The screen of outposts holding inquisitive Boers in check was miles away from the drift where Lumsden’s Horse crossed the main Modder River, and, for all they could see, it might have been still miles off when they marched up a steep track and bivouacked on the pleasant hillside, relieving some New South Wales Mounted Rifles, whose horses had been used up by incessant patrolling. They were, however, in the outpost line there as part of the 8th Mounted Infantry, commanded by Colonel Ross, to whom Colonel Lumsden reported himself that afternoon. Some officers of Regular regiments whose pickets were near at hand came to have a look at these Indian Volunteers, who were quite gratified afterwards to hear that the Colonel of the Norfolks thought them ‘a very fine set of men, but undisciplined.’ It was true enough they had not much discipline of the parade-ground type, but they were held together by bonds stronger than any rules or regulations can weld, and inspired by a sentiment that would have made them ‘play the game’ wherever fortune might place them. And part of that game was for them to be soldiers in deed as well as in spirit, though they might lack the mere outward show of subordination. Spytfontein, which formed the centre of a position held by Lumsden’s Horse, is an outwork of the rugged range that sweeps from east to west in an irregular curve just north of Karree Siding, and from which General Tucker’s division, aided by a turning movement of Cavalry and Mounted Infantry under General French, dislodged the Boers a month earlier. Though they had made several attempts to reoccupy that range in the hope of being able to shell us out of Glen, they lost ground each time, and finally retired to an entrenched position in front of Brandfort, to which Spytfontein was our nearest approach. Trooper Burn-Murdoch in one of his clever letters to the ‘Englishman’ gave an admirable sketch of outpost work when it was a new experience to Lumsden’s Horse: