On March 16, 1900, there glimmered (it cannot be said to have flashed) upon the Army and the half-wondering, half-treacherous population of Bloemfontein, the first number of THE FRIEND. It was produced in the office of the former _Friend of the Free State_--an office that had the appearance of having been arranged out of a dust-heap, and stocked with machinery, type, and furniture that had been originally bought at second-hand and left to itself through fifty years of frequent dust-storms. Everything in it was either the colour of dirt or the tone of type-dust--everything, including the window-panes and the printers. Of the latter we never knew the number, names, or characters. Of two men whom we got to know one was a gnomish figure who only now and then appeared at large out upon the uncharted floor of the composing-room, and he was elderly and silent--a man grown mechanical, and now making but a feeble fight against the dirt and type-dust which was slowly covering him in what was apparently to be another such upright tomb as held the last of the wife of Lot. He sometimes came into the editorial dust-hole--if we yelled and stamped our loudest and our longest. He came wearily and softly, heard our orders, and vanished in the type-dust as we used to see our army friends at Modder step out of our tents into a dust-devil and disappear on the ocean of veldt and at high noon. The other printers lived in the little side alleys between the rows of type-cases. They were evidently drawn there by the feeble, straggling light that still shone faintly through the filth upon the window-panes. I judged that they were older than the foreman, and too feeble, too nearly entombed by the dirt, to be able to go out upon the floor. We only got glimpses of them, and never heard one speak. Out in the back yard, behind Barlow's stationery shop, the sun glared fierce and hot upon a strip of desert ground, a blue gum-tree, and a preternatural boy. He lived out there, refusing to be drawn into the dust-heap until the awful sentence of serving as a printer should, at last, be read out to him. We had a fancy that each of the old men inside had begun like that boy, clinging as long as possible to the region of air and light, that each in his turn had been sucked in at last, and that it was this last boy who went in at lunch time and led the old fellows out of their solitary, silent cells, and gave each a push in the back to start them toward their homes. How Messrs. Gwynne, Buxton, and Landon managed to get out the first paper, which they forgot to mark with what a great man once said were "the saddest words ever seen in print," that is to say, "Vol. I., No. 1," I never asked them, though I wondered. They did produce it, however, and called it Playing Cards. } THE FRIEND. { Cue Tips and All Qualities at } { Wafers Barlow's. } 3d. 3d. { at Barlow's.