fire from some Boers who had crept back to a rocky ledge from which they were raking the whole of that ground with a shower of nickel. John Stuart, of the ‘Morning Post,’ and I went to help two or three who were too badly hit to move, and succeeded in getting them from the bare veldt to comparative safety behind small boulders. One of them told me afterwards that his mind was full of nothing but profound gratitude and admiration when he saw us tucking a comrade into one little sheltered nook, and yet the words that his tongue all the while hurled at us for our folly in not taking cover were quite unfit for publication. No man can pass through experiences of that kind and be in all things the same again. The ‘baptism of fire’ has changed him, though he may never admit it to himself or betray it to his friends. And the time was at hand when Lumsden’s Horse were to take their plunge and emerge from it with the reputation of soldiers in whom trust could be placed from that day forward. The share they had in operations that extended over a front of nearly thirty miles, from Thaba ’Nchu to Ospruit, was comparatively small. But for them it was the most eventful episode of the campaign—their first fight, their passing of the threshold beyond which was the secret of more of human life than they had ever known. In that one day they were to look death in the face, to see comrades, the friends of their youth, fall beside them, to have thoughts of sorrow in their minds but no pang in their hearts. Grief was to come days, perhaps months afterwards, when a chance word or the touch of a hand might set the pent-up currents flowing in channels that war had closed. Above all, they were to know the British soldier as he is in fight—a creature of strange impulses, of wonderful tenderness, when he might be expected to show the roughest qualities with which habit has endowed him, and of sublime endurance. Writing after the plunge, one of Lumsden’s Horse thanks God that he had seen it all: