Had we been able to "inspan" a proof-reader with a Lee-Metford rifle and a determination to use it to enforce his "corrections," we should not have announced the Queen's reception in Dublin as a great tribute by London, neither should we have made Mr. Kipling speak of a "shixlvl" when he wrote a "shovelful." Four of us had to fill a great chasm nine columns long and wide every day, and to do proof-reading as well. We produced the nine columns incidentally as a thing done with our left hands, the while that our minds and souls and master-hands were devoted to correcting proofs. Bravely as we battled with them, they kept coming like a swift tide, until, in a reckless way of putting it, they were heaped on our table as high as the top button on each of our coats. When it came to time to go to press we regularly and daily observed that we had not only overlooked errors enough to wreck our reputations, but that the compositors had failed to correct many of those which we had marked. Gravely, in a body, we used to march to the printing-office and threaten to send the guiltiest culprits as prisoners to Simonstown, charged with being hostile to the blessings of enlightened government. Then we would go to lunch and the paper would come out--so full of mistakes that there was clearly nothing to do but to allow the humour of the situation to have its way, and to laugh until we almost cried at the extravagance of the offences we were committing against journalism and "the art preservative of arts." Despite its whimsicalities, THE FRIEND was a dignified newspaper, and very nearly a complete one. The largest daily circulation of any Bloemfontein newspaper had been 400 copies, but we regularly sold from 5,000 to 5,500 copies. We published Reuter's telegrams from all over the world (semi-occasionally when military messages did not block the wires), and the _Capetown Argus's_ tidings of what went on in South Africa. As I have written elsewhere, "its unique origin and purpose, and its eccentricities, combined to make it the basis of a collecting mania." Copies with a mistake in a date line, corrected after one hundred papers had been struck off, brought five shillings on the date of issue, and ten shillings two days later, and the price had risen to a guinea by the time the newspaper was turned over to the managers of the _Johannesburg Star_ and _Capetown Argus_. This took place when it was apparent to all of us that two or three of us were not in the physical trim to serve THE FRIEND and our distant employers without causing one or the other to suffer great neglect.