Though something went wrong with the ‘Ujina’s’ engines, which had to be stopped twice for repairs in the Bay of Bengal, she covered the remaining fifteen hundred leagues or so in very good time, and, passing Madagascar during the misty night of March 18, was within sight of the South African coast by daybreak of the 24th, and at midday she anchored off Durban, being unable to get nearer that port than the troubled roadstead two miles from shore. Thus her time from the Hugli to Port Natal was just three weeks, and those on board had the satisfaction of hearing that the ‘Lindula,’ with A Company, must be still at sea, having left Durban for Cape Town only three days before the ‘Ujina’s’ arrival. The man who brought that good news had evidently acquired a Kaffir or Oriental habit of saying the things that are pleasant whether true or not. In sober fact, the ‘Lindula’ had gone a week earlier, and was by that time landing her troops at Cape Town. As nobody was allowed to land, Lumsden’s Horse did not get the exciting experience of being lowered in a cage from the troopship’s gangway to a tug plunging and tossing and wriggling among the ‘rollers’ twenty feet below. But they had an opportunity of seeing how the thing was done when a Transport officer came on board that way with an order for the troops under Major Showers’s command to disembark at East London. This officer was accompanied by three of the Natal Carbineers, who had been with Sir Redvers Buller’s force to the relief of Ladysmith, and whose thrilling tales of adventure were as welcome as a newly-discovered series of Arabian Nights’ stories might have been to men who had heard no news for twenty-one days. The general situation was not quite as those Carbineers described it, but their account of Boer resistance in Natal did not by any means convey the idea that war was nearly at an end, although rumour magnified Lord Roberts’s successes to the extent of placing him within a march or so of Kroonstadt at a time when his troops were still hung up at Bloemfontein waiting for food and transport. As B Company had heard of Cronjé’s surrender and the relief of Ladysmith before leaving Calcutta, it would hardly have surprised them to learn that the Union Jack was floating over Pretoria. To them the mere occupation of Bloemfontein seemed a comparatively small matter, so they at once turned and began to rend with keen sarcasm the croakers who had predicted that B Company at least would be too late for anything. Too late! Why, their orders were to disembark at East London, and did not that mean an immediate start for the front? One sanguine trooper in the gladness of his heart wrote, ‘We go on shore at 11.30 to-day, leaving for Bloemfontein by train about the same hour to-night, and expect to arrive in forty-eight hours. We shall probably train to Bethulie and march from there to Bloemfontein, about 120 miles.’ His faith in the marching