Away at dawn on the 7th, and, heading north, tramped many a mile on foot, striking the railway between Vet and Winburg a few miles from Vet, and continuing north some distance. We halted for two or three hours, and then retraced our steps to a camp near the railway, reaching it after dusk. On the 8th our regiment did flank guard for the Infantry during a march of twenty miles, saw innumerable buck, and commandeered twenty remounts on payment. With the incident thus delicately touched upon by Colonel Lumsden an irresponsible trooper deals more at large in a way that enables us to understand the troubles by which some commanding officers were beset when their men, unlike Lumsden’s Horse, did not think it necessary to go through the formality of paying for what they took. Writing from Smaldeel, the trooper says: Yesterday we went fairly straight, but about two or three miles too far, and had to come back; but we caught a young Boer leaving his farm with a rifle and ammunition, and we got another at the farm. The farm was looted of all its live-stock. The Colonel stopped it when he came up, but all the poultry was taken. Our men paid for everything. Kruger has told all these people that their farms will be burned and all the women taken prisoners. I think they were rather relieved when we left. One woman said her husband had come back three weeks ago and died of wounds, and they said the Free-Staters had lost terribly. They never hear officially, as they keep the deaths dark, but almost every farm has lost at least one man. In one we passed there were three widows. They are rather nice people and can nearly all speak English, and are rather nice-looking. We have fifty-one horses sick—about half with pink-eye and the other half sore backs and lame—but we make it up by degrees. Yesterday we collected eleven and the day before about the same, but in the night they got away. We also brought along 200 sheep and some cows; the sheep we have given over to the brigade, except about twenty for our own use. We carry with us to-morrow two days’ rations and four on the carts in case the transport don’t come up. McMinn and Francis, of my section, got lost leading sick horses. McMinn has attached himself to another brigade, but nothing has been heard of Francis. The self-restraint exercised by soldiers who left untouched the stores and paid for all the live-stock they took at every farm where women and children had been left by the retreating Boers will be appreciated by all who know what it is to march and fight day after day on short rations. Though Lumsden’s Horse laid in that store of supplies, it did not last them many days, as we gather from a continuation of the Colonel’s diary: