_To the Editors of_ THE FRIEND,--SIRS,--Is this a chestnut? Johannes Paulus Kruger sent a commissioner home to England to find out if there were any more men left there. The commissioner wired from London to say that there were 4,000,000 men and woman "knocking about the town," that there was no excitement, and that men were begging to be sent to fight the Boers. Kruger wired back "Go North." The commissioner found himself in Newcastle eventually and wired to Kruger, "For God's sake, stop the war! England is bringing up men from hell, eight at a time, in cages!" He had seen a coal mine. * * * * * CIRCULATION, APRIL 11, 5,500. The circulation of THE FRIEND is as large as that of all the Bloemfontein papers combined.[18] [Footnote 18: This was a transparent joke, as there was no other paper in the town. But, joking apart, there never had been a newspaper in that country or region with such a circulation as ours enjoyed; yet it could have been twice as large had we employed our carts to circulate it in the outlying camps.--J. R.] * * * * * DOTS OR NO DOTS. _All about the New Stamp Issue._ BY MORTIMER MENPES. How strange a thing it is that so small a matter as a general taste for collecting stamps should, as it were, elevate a man at a single bound into a position where his slightest tact at discrimination in detecting the difference of shades between two bits of paper of the same colour will sway and determine the destinies of a horde of fanatical collectors! That a man should occupy so exalted a position was accidentally brought to my notice after a return to Bloemfontein from a run to the Cape, where I found the Market Square, the club, the hotels and the street corners grouped with people who appeared to be intensely interested in the discussion of some all-important subject. Thinking that some radical proclamation had been issued, I paused to listen, but instead of legal phrase and technical form greeting my ear, the only intelligible word which I could detect in the buzz which emanated from the centre of the group was "Dot." I passed on to another group, where the same "dot" arrested my attention; then to a third, which was also "dotty," until, feeble and bewildered, I helplessly wandered about on the verge of an incurable "dottiness" myself.