I have kept our accounts as nearly as possible up to date, but we are unaware if any pay already claimed has yet been placed to our credit in Cape Town, and in the meantime troopers are receiving advances through this office out of the funds brought by me from India. Fortunately, I have been able to cash cheques in the towns we have passed through, and I hope I may succeed in doing so at Pretoria to-morrow, as our cash in the box is reduced to four sovereigns. We have received no mails, either from England or India, for the past six weeks, and we are all anxiously awaiting news. The Special Correspondent of the ‘Englishman,’ whose close association with the corps in all circumstances can be traced through every letter, does not take his banishment to lines of communication with the Stoical philosophy that characterises Colonel Lumsden. After the freshness of it has gone he writes: Irene—that’s where Lumsden’s Horse have been putting in time since Lord Roberts supplanted Paul Kruger in the jurisdiction of the town and in the hearts of the people of Pretoria. Irene is not so called because of any resemblance it bears to the Irene of the classics. For of all the forsaken places which it has pleased Providence to dot down on this earth of ours Irene is the most forsaken. Perhaps the Boers, in their cunning, calculated that by giving it a name like music its reproach in the land might be less. The predominating feature of the scenery in Irene is the railway. That, with rare persistence for a Transvaal railway, runs right through the place in a straight line. The late Government of this country knew a lot about railways. A crow might have done the distance between, say, Bloemfontein and Pretoria in 250 miles, but it takes the railway 500 miles. And each mile cost as many hundred pounds to build. The Government fell in with the contractor’s miscalculation. The railway is full of curves, elegant but unnecessary, and the Government—_garib admi, sahib! Huzoor, bucksheesh!_ Near the station stood a culvert so big that it deserved to be called a bridge. There the Boers had placed a charge of dynamite. The dynamite went off pop, and the bridge, the embankment, a section of the river, and a large slice of the scenery became as naught. Then as Lord Roberts swept north he dropped a Sapper or two—no orders, no need of any. But in three days trains as long as Chowringhee skipped over where the bridge had been, and only the two Sappers trembled for the safety of their bag o’ tricks. No Tommy ever doubts the inventions of a Sapper. And, despite the absent-mindedness attributed to him, Tommy is a man ever suspicious of the doings of his neighbour. But everybody knows about Sappers and their wonderful works.