Some miles ahead of us—though seemingly quite close, owing to the intensely clear atmosphere—lay a long range of low-lying hills all lighted up with various shades of colouring, the hues of which kept ever changing from moment to moment as the sun rose higher in the heavens. Still further on, and filling up the whole background of this typically African landscape, lay the razor-backs and table-topped peaks of the Basuto hills, from the tops of which soft filmy wisps of cloud drifted silently away into that great blue ‘nothingness.’ All peace! Peace on earth, it seemed to us that fair morn. Nor could we poor troopers realise that ere God’s life-giving sun should set that night great Mars would look down on many of us poor mortals writhing in the agonies of cruel death-dealing wounds and the tortures of the surgeon’s knife and probe, while some poor souls, like these vanishing vapoury clouds, would have left this little world for the infinite beyond. Nor could the mind of our well-loved Major, as he rode at the head of those men he had known for long, long years, have realised that in a few short hours his true British heart would have ceased to beat, and his life’s blood would be mingled with the dust of that great continent where so many good men and true had already given up their lives for an Empire’s cause. Thank God for the impenetrable veil that He casts over our future! One scene especially struck me by its beauty, and that was when a battery of Artillery toiled over a tussocky ridge right into the blazing disc of the sun. As gun after gun topped the ridge the whole team, horses and men, were shut out from our sight by the powerful blaze of light in a most curious way; while here and there a khaki-clad helmeted Artilleryman stood silhouetted against the sky-line, over which the khaki gun-carriages disappeared into a glaring sea of gold. As we were now approaching some suspicious-looking kopjes, we opened out into extended order as usual, and Lumsden’s Horse were told off to take, and _hold_, a certain line of kopjes some two miles off. So we promptly set to work, approaching them very ‘cannily,’ with scouts well out in advance.