As long ago before this as when Sir Alfred Milner was with us in Bloemfontein, we had made known to him and to Lord Roberts, through Lord Stanley, that the employers of certain ones among us were complaining of our expending part of their time and our energy upon this outside work. I am certain that no interest with which any of us were connected suffered the least slight or injury, for the result of our labour of love for Lord Roberts was simply that we worked twice as hard--and learned twice as much of what was going on as those correspondents who held aloof and let the whole burden fall upon us. My employer, Mr. Harmsworth, uttered no sound of criticism or complaint, by the way, and the only word about THE FRIEND that reached me from the _Daily Mail_ was a cablegram wishing us success. We were all tiring fast. I was lame with an injury which kept laying me up, and otherwise my condition was such that for weeks I had not been able to partake of any food except milk and soda water. I owe a great deal for moral and physical stimulus to Dr. Kellner, ex-mayor of Bloemfontein and head of the Free State Hospital, whose services to the British army should not be allowed to pass into history without his receiving some substantial honour and acknowledgment from this government. He told the noble matron, Miss Maud Young, and her nursing assistants (when they gave notice that they wished to leave at the outbreak of the war) that he "never heard before that politics had anything to do with the care of sick and wounded men," and up to that standard of duty he worked on with them as enthusiastically under the Union Jack as he had under the four-colour flag. I did not know how ill and dispirited I was until one evening I went to the room of my assistant, Mr. Nissen, of the DAILY MAIL, and heard through his closed window in the Bloemfontein Hotel the sound of a banjo. It is a purely American instrument, and the plunk-plunk of its strings made my heart leap. I threw open the window and heard in nasal tones, affected by a Yankee colleague for the purpose of his song, a sentiment like this:-- Oh, I want ter go back to Noo York, Ther "tenderloin's" ther place, Where the men are square and the women are fair And I know evurry face. I want ter go back to Noo York Ter hear Gawd's people talk. Yer may say what yer please Only just give ter me My little old Noo York. I felt like shouting, "fellow citizens, them's my sentiments." Suddenly I, too, wanted "ter go back ter Noo York"--with London as an alternative. I had not known it or felt it before, but that song, as new to me as any that will be written five years hence, touched the button that produced a nostalgia which Heaven knows I had good reason to feel without any such additional or peculiar incentive.