To get away from the hotels, to get more into contact with the spirit of the siege, I have been camping out for some days at the most outlying position upon the west facing of the town, but even by such means it is infinitely difficult to find much that is instinctive with active and actual campaigning. We perform the duties of a vedette, watching by day and night, sleeping at oddly-snatched moments, ever ready, and straining our vision in wild efforts to find trace of the foe. But it amounts to but little in the end. Since Monday we have seen small detachments of the Boers daily, we have even exchanged outpost fire with them, while we have on three different occasions turned our guns upon their position at the waterworks; but these occurrences are purely incidental and not wholly relative to the main features of the situation. It has become quite necessary for us to justify our own existence, and since there be but such vague signs of war around us, this desire has become infinitely more difficult of fulfilment. As the time passes we receive messages daily from different units in the Boer commando to friends in Mafeking, which are sometimes amicable, sometimes impudent in character; but to increase the irony of our situation, if we be engaged in the press of battle at dawn, it is certain that at dusk we shall be dining with no small degree of luxury at the hotel. At present there has been no misery, for there has been no war, and apart from the five lives that have been lost already, Mafeking to-day is as it was a month ago. It would seem as though this gigantic war, which so many people have been urging upon the Government, in relation to the operations of the enemy along this frontier may develop into a series of cattle raids by armed Boers. But if there be little in the immediate situation to alarm us, there is behind the rose and silver of the clouds a dark spot, a spot which growing bigger, ever bigger as the days go by, implies that signs of the times are not wanting to prove that our official optimism, forecasting the siege as but of three weeks' duration, is based upon anything less secure than the imaginings of a man who, knowing the hollowness of his words in his own heart, seeks but to cheer the hearts of the garrison. There was little sign of readiness in the Imperial troops, little to show that they can relieve Mafeking before the year dies out in the birth of the closing twelve months of the nineteenth century. But it were heresy to say so now. The idle singer of an empty day dares not pronounce the denunciation of his country in her hour of danger. Nevertheless, if Mafeking be not relieved before the Christmas season, the hour of our existence will be an hour of travail, impressed with the echoes of much suffering and saddened by the memories of many who will be dead. But for the time we will ignore the gravity in our situation, mock at our splendid isolation, our scanty resources, since to dwell too long