This town is hungry. The shops are practically bare. Nothing worth speaking of comes to market. The matter has passed from the stage at which it might be regarded as a joke. Bloemfontein really hungers for necessary articles of diet, and it has one week in which to raise an extra appetite before the first train of foodstuffs comes to its stores. The hopes of two trucks a day for Bloemfontein merchants, held out two weeks ago by the Imperial Military Railway Officials, have proved vain. The two trucks never came. The line has been taken up wholly by the transportation of troops and army supplies. Next Thursday, however, unless the present plan is changed, a train of 20 trucks will leave Port Elizabeth with goods for merchants here. There will be one train a week thereafter. All day on Wednesday and Thursday the business men flocked to the Director of Supplies, who will assign to each his proportion of tonnage. For a week the best families of Bloemfontein have been without butter or sugar. The hospitals have commandeered nearly all the fresh milk. There is not a can of condensed milk to be bought in town, nor a can of jam, nor of cocoa, nor a pound of coffee. The last candles sold in town were sent in from a country store. They disappeared in a day. The town depends for its potatoes on the few which come into town every morning. The daily supply of fresh vegetables is so small as to be hardly worth mentioning. Toilet soaps and English laundry soap disappeared long ago. You cannot buy a razor or a shaving-brush or a tooth-brush. More than one druggist lacks material for putting up prescriptions: glycerine, cascara, bromide of potassium, boracic acid, carbolic disinfectants, ginger, zinc oxide, blue ointment, acetate of lead, and iodoform. Absence of some of these from the prescription shelves might result seriously. Eno's Salts and chlorodyne cannot be bought in town. Beecham's Pills were "all out" four months ago. The flour mills have been closed for several days for want of water. They will resume, feeding their boilers with well water, but the end of the wheat supply is in sight. There is still mealie meal, but bakers declare that it won't make bread. Cigars that are worth smoking and whisky worth drinking haven't been seen for a week. Hospitals take all the soda-water that the factory can make. Shoemakers have not even veldschoens in ordinary sizes. They have had no leather for two weeks, so shoe repairing is out of the question. Winter is coming on, the mornings are already growing chilly, but clothiers have no hose and no heavy underwear of white man's quality. All hats suitable for army wear were sold long ago. Merchants declare that if they had not been promised two trucks a day by rail they would have brought supplies from Kimberley by ox-waggon. It would have taken six days, but would have been worth while. CHAPTER XXVIII OUR "FRIEND" NO LONGER