A Boer Colonel came riding by, scanning closely the scene of the struggle. He claimed the unconscious Roger as his prisoner—out of pity—and whistled up carriers and a stretcher to bear him to the nearest dressing-station. Here he was attended to by one of the numerous German doctors who had volunteered for service with the Boer armies. _From Major Roger Brentham, D.S.O., to Lady Silchester._ British Hospital, Unguja, _Novr._ 27, 1900. DEAREST SIBYL,— A steamer coming from the south to-day brought me your letter of last March! I had got several of your postcards showing yourself and Lady Landolphia in nurses’ uniform and with dreadful smiles of glittering teeth, and knew of course—heard, I mean—what you were doing for our men out in South Africa. The letter was sent on by my Agents; I expect it got hung up in the military censorship, and I must say I don’t blame them! Your unconscious criticisms of our generalship were pretty pungent. I wonder I got it at all. But better late than never! After I have read it a third time I shall burn it because there is one classical tag I never forget: _Littera scripta manet_. I see by the London papers of September you are not only back in England—or rather Scotland—but entertaining as of yore at Glen Sporran. And playing with the same old toys! How indefatigable you are in your pursuit of power! How unwearied by the social routine, which would drive me into exile or into murder. I should end by killing the poor old _fantoches_—Vicky Long-i’-the-Tooth, Stacy Bream, and the others—I forget their names—the Right Honble. gentleman who spat like a cobra—only it was very kindly saliva, not at all venomous—and that moral enthusiast over the Empire—Albert Something. I see by the same paper he is now Lord Bewdly and has been uttering some beautiful sentiments over the results expected from the Boer War.... You were Stellenbosched, and with reason, because your hospitals and convalescent homes were there (I see, by the bye, that Willowby Patterne, who came an awful cropper at Driefontein and generally misconducted himself, was also Stellenbosched by K. of K. I hope you did not foregather with him?) ... Well, as I was saying, you were Stellenbosched and saw little of the horrors of War. But I did, and I used often to wish that Albert person could have been with me and seen the burning of the homesteads, the cutting down of the fruit-trees, the fugitive women and little children, the Boer boys of eleven and twelve dressed up for war like their fathers and elder brothers and fighting for their homes. I saw one of these boys—tousled yellow hair, nice grey eyes—in a buckskin suit much too big for him, laid out to die by the road-side, just after we had burnt his father’s home. I don’t suppose one of our chaps really set out to kill him. But there it was; he had been shot through the lungs and was gasping out his life, blood pouring out of his mouth at each gasp.