After days on duty, in which they were not allowed to be slack, troopers felt little inclination for walking the four or five miles to Bloemfontein, which did not become more cheerful as the number of troops increased, except for the traders, who were rapidly getting back all they had lost by the war and a great deal more. Officers had always the chance, whenever they could get away from camp for an hour or two, of pleasant social meetings at the Bloemfontein Club, where generals, regimental commanders, and company officers from other brigades came together for a little while at lunch or afternoon tea and exchanged all the rumours that could be told in a few minutes—and they were many. It was a place of strange meetings. Men from the uttermost corners of the earth, who had perhaps not seen each other for years, foregathered there, only to separate a little later and go on their ways with different columns, none knew whither. Troopers had similar experiences in the streets and inns of Bloemfontein, where nearly every regimental badge of the British Army and every distinguishing plume adopted by Irregulars who had come to fight as ‘soldiers of the Queen’ were to be seen in a variety that seemed endless. Brothers whose paths in life had parted when they left school, one going east, another west or south, came face to face in the streets of that little Free State town or rubbed shoulders in a motley crowd of khaki-clad soldiers, sometimes without recognising each other, until accident gave them some clue. A rough word or two of careless greeting, a tight hand-grip, a steadfast look into eyes that remind the boys of father or mother, a light laugh on lips that might otherwise betray too much feeling, a drink together (if it is to be had), for ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and then with a jaunty ‘So long, old chap,’ they part again. It is a superstition, or at any rate a recognised custom, not to say ‘Good-bye’ in such circumstances. But if men only thought of its literal meaning, what better wish could there be? Yet, for all its stir and bustle and dramatic incidents, Bloemfontein was a dull place in those days for any man who entered it and found no intimate friends there to greet him. Comrades they all were, but in a rough-and-ready sort of comradeship that needed the fire of the battlefield to try it and perchance anneal it into something stronger than the ties of mere kinship. But this is a thing which only soldiers understand, and seldom even they. Lumsden’s Horse knew it not then, but for some of them the secret was to be disclosed before many days had passed, and in a form that will never fade from their memory. Meanwhile, they went about their duties methodically enough in camp or took their pleasures sadly in streets where thousands of soldiers wandered daily, finding no entertainment, no place of resort except dingy bars, where liquors of more than alcoholic potency were sold, and very little change from campaign fare except at a price that made even