We have learnt to cook now, and can serve up chops, steaks, stews, and curries as well as any cook—when we can get the meat. We have been lucky lately in bivouacking near farmhouses, as we can commandeer chickens and sheep, paying for them when we are caught! We have, for the last few days, been getting to our camps after sundown, and by the time the fires are lighted and the meat ready to cook it is quite 9 o’clock. It takes an hour or so to cook, and the eating lasts longer, as the meat stands a deal of masticating. We seldom get to bed before 12, and are always ready by 5 o’clock, so you can imagine how invigorating the climate of this place is. It is bitterly cold at night and hot in the day, yet very few of our men are down with fever. It is a fine climate, but a fearful country. For miles and miles you see nothing but immense, undulating, treeless, waterless tracts of poor pasture-land. Here and there you find small ponds of dirty water, but whether it is rain-water dammed up or whether these are springs I have not yet been able to ascertain. The farmers here make their living by breeding cattle, and not by cultivation at all. We have marched from one end of the Orange State to the other, and I don’t suppose all the cultivation I have seen would cover ten acres. A year of drought or disease, I should think, would tell very heavily on farmers here. Queen’s Town is the only town in Africa that I can really say I have seen; we either camped outside the other towns or merely passed through without having time to see them. We rode through Bloemfontein, and from what I could see of it it seems to be a large town built on the slopes of two or three converging hills, and fairly dirty. Several of the towns we have passed consisted of half-a-dozen zinc houses, two at least of which are bound to be churches; of the remaining four, one will be a store and the rest dwelling-houses. But each dwelling-house is a township in itself. Even the ‘mild Hindu’ marvels at the number of people who live in one house, no matter how small it may be. There was a farmhouse near our camp at Bloemfontein, where we used to go sometimes to get a cup of coffee. This house had two rooms, each one about twenty-five feet square. It contained the following permanent residents—they said, they had visitors sometimes too—one old woman and three young ones and three young men and six children of sorts and sizes. One of the rooms was used as a kitchen and larder, so there was only one for general use. Needless to say, these people were Boers! One trooper of A Company, writing to friends in Calcutta, has nothing but expressions of admiration for the behaviour of British Bluejackets, to whom he pays appreciative tribute in the following extract: