glowing with the purple and gold and scarlet flowers of lilies and asters innumerable, and the gorgeous crowns of mesembryanthemums of every conceivable shade, from white through primrose and orange to the deepest crimson. In its winter state the Great Karroo brings back to travellers of wide African experience clear memories of the Northern Soudan. In all chief physical features the two regions, so widely separated, are curiously alike. Here are pyramidal mountains with flat-topped crowns rising wall-like above the conical base exactly resembling the ‘Jebels’ on which one has looked with weary eyes, day after day, through the rippling heat of the Soudan deserts. In some parts of the Karroo these mountains close upon narrow gorges, along which the railway winds, and its sudden turns round rocky buttresses seem so familiar to one who knows the old military line above Wady Halfa that he can imagine himself travelling once more through the desolate Batn el Hagar towards Khartoum. To men for whom the rugged Karroo had no such associations with the land of mysterious fascination, there may well have been a wearisome monotony in the unvarying repetition of similar forms—the vast plains whereon no tree bigger than the _Acacia horrida_ grows, and where the houses, if any, are so widely separated that they only serve to deepen the impression of melancholy solitude; the waterless rivers, the bare brown kops. For full appreciation of the Karroo one must have breathed its invigorating air from childhood, and seen it in seasons of beauty with all the glory of its summer raiment on. De Aar Junction is no more than a huge collection of railway sheds and equally hideous houses set in the most barren plain of the Great Karroo; but Lumsden’s Horse saw it busy with many signs of military preparation for a forward movement, and so it seemed to them the very gateway of the fateful future, in the shaping of which they were to have a hand. That night they crossed the Orange River at Norval’s Pont, where Railway Pioneers, mostly skilled artificers from the Johannesburg mines, under Major Seymour—‘the greatest of mechanical engineers,’ as Colonel Girouard styled him—were hard at work, night and day, repairing the broken bridge, while baggage was being transferred by the wire trolly high overhead. Lumsden’s Horse crossed the pontoon ‘deviation’ to a train on the farther side, and when morning dawned they were journeying slowly—with many precautions against possible surprises by marauding Boers—to the goal of their hopes. Bloemfontein was reached by A Company in the afternoon of April 3, when they went into camp at Rustfontein, two miles from the town, and became part of the 8th M.I. Regiment, under the command of that very able leader, Colonel ‘Watty’ Ross, whose portrait appears on the opposite page. Of him Colonel Lumsden writes: ‘No better man could have been chosen to command a body of Irregular Horse. Capable, tactful, with a keen eye for a country, and a man hard