The Protectorate Regiment is strictly an irregular soldiery, composed of men drawn from every rank of African life, many of whom are gentle by birth and education and possessed of no little means. In the ranks of the regiment there are those who have been at the university and public schools; there are also mechanics, miners, farm hands, and men who have known office life. The nationalities of the men are as varied as their occupations in peace times are diffuse. There are a few Americans, some Germans, and Norwegians, although for the most part the regiment is British; as a whole, perhaps, it is an ill-assorted assembly of adventurers, animated with the same love of fighting and the glories of war, of lust and bloodshed which characterised the lives of the buccaneers of old. In other days, and in other lands, they would be sailing the sea for treasure, or combining in the quest for gold in some hidden extremity of the world's surface. The prospect of free rations, of uniform, and allowance of pocket money, was of course sufficient to draw a few; but, as a body, the idler upon the farm, the bar-loafer from the town, and the thoroughly incompetent are as distinguished by their absence, as the general tone of the regiment is suffused with martial ardour. It is quite impossible to treat these men with the cast-iron regulations which enthral the Imperial soldier. He does not understand the petty exactions, the never-ending restraint which would be imposed upon him had he accepted the conditions which govern and regulate life in our army. He experiences and gives voice to a very genuine aversion to fatigues of every description, and it has required the exercise of much tact and no little personal persuasion to induce the men to become reconciled to the labours of their calling. They have accepted with some diffidence the fact that it is necessary for them to fulfil, at the present moment, many irritating, but essentially important fatigues which may not have entered into their original forecast of the duties which would be allotted to them. They frequently indulge in outbursts of choice expletives, at the expense of their non-commissioned officers, while they do not hesitate to correct, or at least to argue about what they imagine to be wrong in the execution of some order.