Christmas Eve--a memorable day in its own way--dawned in due course. It was not the siege alone, with its attendant inconveniences, that made it memorable. It was not that the season accentuated the want of _enough_ to eat; nor was it the absence of the time-honoured turkey that tried us most. There was something else besides, namely, the capers of the sun. Thermal phenomena are of course not strictly pertinent to my story. But I feel impelled to digress for a little and warm, as it were, to this new element of discomfort, provided doubtless as a Christmas Box by the thoughtful clerk of the weather. To those of us who were enjoying our first taste of a sunny southern summer the heat of the day was excruciating; it literally took one's breath away. A man could not even read; he tried to, in the hope of falling asleep incidentally. But in vain. 'Nature's soft nurse' was not to be cajoled by artifice. There was no air, no breeze to fan her softness. The thermometer registered on its imperturbable face one hundred and seven in the shade, at which experts who had passed the whole of their summers in the furnace of the Diamond City inveighed against the slowness of the instrument and its lapse from the path of rectitude. The cant of the day ordained the twenty-fifth of December the "hottest day of the year." Well, the newcomers felt that if it were to be redder than the twenty-fourth they might jump into the Kimberley mine, without danger of landing on their feet, and enjoy a better pudding in a better and (perhaps) cooler world. It was a day to make one fed in all seriousness that life is not worth living; and to a man fresh from over-sea the association of Christmas with such weather--to say nothing of the victuals!--was the acme of satire. There is no whiteness in the African Christmas, and for the first time in their lives the newcomers sighed for a "green" one! A "green" one would cool the atmosphere, and a cooler atmosphere would content us. We would gladly let the turkey and the pudding pass if the Turkish Bath would go too. Had the shade of _Santa Claus_, or the flesh and blood of anybody, come loaded with poultry for our "stockings," we should not have said, thank you. Our appetites were gone. They were gone, and all we asked was that they should be restored for Christmas Day--just as if _Claus_ had indeed made amends for the cruel kindness of the "Clerk!" It was kind of Sir Alfred Milner to arrange a congratulatory flash of compliments (by signal from Modder River) and to wish us all sorts of luck. One sort would have sufficed: the kind contained in a record output of rain. Would it come? First it would--and then it would not. A duststorm intervened by way of compromise; it was a breeze--hot, choking, blinding, but still a breeze. We got thunder and lightning, too; but the rain hesitated--as if it knew there was little left to soak in Kimberley. It ultimately relented, however, and came down in torrents through the night.