Long streets, ill-paved and deep in mud or dust; a low stoep-shaded cottage with vines trailing about its posts here and there between long rows of featureless shops; a large market square where no farm produce is displayed; a club frequented by British officers who have little time to lounge; several churches of the primmest Dutch type, with tall steeples that cut sharply against the clear sky in lines uncompromisingly straight; some public buildings, pretentious without grace or beauty; on one side a steep hill terraced with houses of which little but the corrugated iron roofs can be seen; on the other, roads that straggle off to level outskirts, where villas painfully new stand in the midst of flowerless gardens surrounded by barbed wire. These were the first impressions of Bloemfontein gathered by Lumsden’s Horse, and few troopers had any opportunity to modify these impressions in more favourable circumstances afterwards. The camp to which A Company went originally at Rietfontein was within two miles of the town, and might have been pleasant enough if thousands of hoofs had not cut up its turf, and the ground had not been used as a dumping-place for rubbish which Boer commandos could not turn to any use. Some of them had been there before Lumsden’s Horse, and several British regiments also. So many tens of thousands of soldiers were camped round about the town that they may have interrupted the currents of salubrious air which made Bloemfontein famous in other days as a resort for invalids. There were plenty of invalids to be seen there in the early weeks of April 1900, but they did not regard it as the best type of sanatorium, and men who had to sleep in small tents on the reeking ground of Rietfontein would not willingly go there again in search of health. They had hardly begun to realise how serious was the stoppage of a fresh water supply which the Boers had cut off from the main at Modder River. Hundreds of old wells existed in the town and its outskirts, and by opening these enough water could be drawn for immediate wants. But, alas! the water had been undisturbed since Bloemfontein began to draw its supply from the distant waterworks some six or seven years earlier. What impurities had drained into the wells during all that time nobody knew until hospitals filled rapidly with patients suffering from enteric and dysentery. Rietfontein was showing symptoms of an outbreak, and so, after a week under canvas there, Lumsden’s Horse got the welcome order to strike camp and form a new one some three miles farther north, by Deel’s Farm, where a clear spruit flows over its bed of white gravel between banks that are shaded by tall eucalyptus trees and drooping sallows.