We were acting as rearguard to Dickson’s column, when Captain Clifford’s horse took fright and ran away while his master was dismounted. One of our sailors, Parks, went after it, and followed it for two miles at right angles to our line of advance. We saw him catch the horse and begin leading it back, and then saw him no more, though we waited half an hour. As messages were coming from the rearguard commander to us to follow more quickly, we had to leave, all fully convinced that our poor Parks had been ambushed. [Illustration: CORPORAL J. GRAVES] After a mile or so, our widely extended line came down a long, fairly steep incline, on the top of the opposite slope of which we saw our Battery O in position. As we neared the bottom of the intervening valley the battery opened fire with one round, which burst on the top of the slope we had just left, and looking round we saw a party of six men riding down at a gallop, waving a handkerchief. They turned out to be some of our own men, who, having at the last moment seen Parks coming in, waited for him. The battery had seen the heads of mounted men in slouch hats advance quickly, and, mistaking them for Boers following us, had ‘laid’ for them. The shot was such a good one that it knocked off the hat of Sergeant Graves, and the Adjutant’s office went near to losing its clerk, and the Bank of Bengal one of its rising staff. Another correspondent continues the narrative: On the 26th the united brigades reached Heidelberg by sundown, but sustained two casualties in the rearguard. The safe escort of the convoy is locally reported as a creditable performance, and there were no fewer than 150 casualties in the united brigades since leaving Machadodorp. It was a very trying march, as rain fell nearly every day in torrents. Sleep was out of the question in deep pools of water, and _réveille_ daily at 2.30 A.M. gave us little rest. We had taken 109 prisoners and brought on some twenty refugee families. Heidelberg is the prettiest town we have yet seen in the Transvaal, nestling as it does at the base of a rugged kopje in a perfect tope of eucalyptus, willow, peach, and oak trees. The majority of the houses are above the ordinary type—flowers abound in the gardens, and the surrounding veldt has donned its spring coat of green; the fruit trees are loaded with fruit, which in another month should sweeten our rations of dry biscuits. But—there is a ‘but’—the stores are absolutely barren. Foodstuffs and provisions of every kind are badly needed by the residents themselves. A Wesleyan clergyman informed the writer that he hadn’t tasted meat for a week.