If we were only just ourselves, merely the defenders of a town against an enemy, we could endure our privations, our short rations, and our condemned water with even greater fortitude. The men live hard lives in Africa, and their constitutions are strong, their nerves firm. But they hate, as all men hate, in all parts of the world, that their womenfolk should suffer, and here is the misery of our situation, more especially that these gentle creatures should suffer before their own eyes, when they themselves can do nothing for them. Aye, indeed, there's the rub. A hard life is always hardest upon women, and, unlike the Australasian colonies, and Canada, or the Western States of America, and all places where women who lead colonial life have no black labour to rely upon, the women in Africa are curiously incapable, delegating a multitudinous variety of domestic duties to the natives they employ. Their sphere of daily activity, so far as it is in relation to their household, is reduced to a minimum, while consciously or through the absence of some active pursuit by which they could occupy their mind and exercise their bodies, their view of life is petty and impressed with prejudices and absurd jealousies. Moreover, they are abnormally lazy; indeed, to one who has lived in Australasia, America, Africa, India, and elsewhere, and has experience of life in those colonies, the lassitude and indolence of the South African woman is one of the most striking aspects of the daily life in Africa. In Natal this weariness is called the "Natal sickness," and in Mafeking at the present juncture it is responsible for a great deal of the discontent, the unwillingness to make the best of an exceedingly trying situation. Without the feminine element in Mafeking, the civil and military authorities would be in better accord, but with a pack of women and children in an insanitary laager, caring nothing for the exigencies of the situation, firmly believing that they are oppressed by design and deliberately maltreated, and, rising up in their wrath, smiting the Colonel, the Chief Staff Officer, indeed, the entire Headquarters' Staff, or any military and official unit that comes unfortunately into contact with them, the worry and annoyance caused to the garrison at large by their presence here at this juncture is eminently worse than the most fearsome thing it is possible to conceive. Of course, one sympathises in all sincerity with these unfortunate non-combatants, for they live amid conditions which produce and promote typhoid, malaria, and diphtheria--diseases that have been peculiarly virulent, and from which many women and children have died.