In furtherance of the knowledge that the Army was tired of being fooled, and growing weary of the upstart behaviour of the too often treacherous negro natives, we published a notice by Assistant Provost-Marshal Burnett-Hitchcock: "No pass is sufficient for a native to pass through the outpost lines unless countersigned by a Staff Officer, and it should state where and whence the native is going." Other rigid restrictions upon the freedom of the negroes are enforced by this order. The same energetic officer also forbade the selling of any article within the town by hawkers and camp sutlers, under a penalty of fine on conviction. This was in order to protect the local tradesmen from army competition--including those who barricaded their shops when the Boer combatants fled from the town, lest we should loot their stores of goods, who then calmly told us they put up the barricades because "the Boers were such thieving scoundrels," and who, now that they knew our temper only too well, regaled us with accounts of how, while they were in commando, they had fought us at Belmont, Graspan, Modder, and a dozen other places. We published on this day an article by Mr. H. Owen Scott on "The War Artist of To-day," in which he, a photographer, seriously extolled the work of the camera as compared with that of the genius and training of the true artist. We hoped the real artists thus relegated to a subordinate and vanishing place would enliven our columns by their replies. * * * * * THE FRIEND. (_Edited by the War Correspondents with Lord Roberts' Force._) No. 22] BLOEMFONTEIN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1900. [Price One Penny. NOTICE. The Bands of the 12th Brigade will play in the Market Square this evening between the hours of 4 and 6. * * * * * THE CIRCULATION OF "THE FRIEND." The present circulation of THE FRIEND is 4,750 copies daily. * * * * * WE APOLOGIZE. In our modest way as Editors of quite the most extraordinary newspaper on earth, we endeavoured to publish yesterday, with due credit to the _Times_, for which it was written, Mr. Rudyard Kipling's masterly article "The Sin of Witchcraft." We may as well acknowledge here and now that though THE FRIEND is declared to be edited by a committee of war correspondents, it is, in fact, the daily product of a struggle between the correspondents and their printers, the latter being the more numerous, and, we sometimes fear, the more in earnest in their determination to keep the paper unique. This results in a paper which is often as great a novelty to the Editors as to the public, being like Shakespeare's soldier in "The Seven Stages of Man," "full of strange oaths," and words of which we never heard, as well as ideas to which we never gave birth.