You called our brothers and sisters cowards as they fled your oppression and bitter and openly expressed hatred. You threw white feathers into our carriages as they passed you by. You loudly bemoaned your fate as a woman and longed to don masculine garments to aid your beaux in exterminating the hated English. Could we remember a "loving hand" then? You were quick to tell us that there would be no room for us to live beside you so soon as Mr. Englishman was driven back to the sea. The hated English had never been wanted, and would not be allowed to stay. And since you continue to make no secret of your hatred, the same remedy is now in your hands. But it will be difficult to find a spot where Mr. Englishman is not _en evidence_. Such was Bloemfontein to those who saw into its heart and knew its temper. Some of us conquerors saw a little way behind the garlanded curtain the false-hearted pretenders of friendship drew down before our faces, but for what now seems a long time the Army fed itself upon the honeyed lying of those people who had not the courage or honesty to play the part of open enemies to the last. As for Tommy Atkins, he seemed oblivious of everything but that which he enjoyed--which was simply to walk about the town spending his money, and taking insults and bouquets equally as a matter of course, just as they happened to come. Let the reader note two things of the first interest, and of great human and historic value. The persons who did not come out and pretend to be our friends were the women. The part of the population that did not join in singing "Soldiers of the Queen" was the feminine part. The only person who openly and plainly espoused the cause of the Boers was Miss Bloemfontein--a woman. The only person who answered her and proudly asserted her loyalty to Great Britain was Miss Uitlander--a woman. Everywhere in every war it is Lovely Woman who fans the flames, who urges on the fighting, who charges the men to win or die, but never to give up; who nurses the hatreds of the strife to her breast and keeps them hot. Everywhere it is the civilised and the savage woman who does this, and only the half-civilised have made a contrary record, for I am told that in one strife there was an exception. That was "the Mutiny" in India, where the ayahs and other Indian female servants stuck to their posts in the British households, and played no part in the awful affair.