It must not even be supposed that men could be brought into this savage state of mind without many harrowing causes of anger. I have not related the many proofs we had had of the fiendish ferocity of our foes. We had all seen the victims, or the remains, of their abominable tortures: women disembowelled, and their unborn progeny laid before them; men mutilated, and their amputated members placed in derision to adorn their yet living bodies, their wounds exposed to flies and maggots, and fated to feel death thus crawling loathsomely over them. All this had exasperated the men into frenzy. We all knew what awaited us if we fell into their power. It is true that people at home, who descant quietly on the rights of man, may have some difficulty in realising the feelings of the men. As this supposed case of murder was not reported to me for several days, and when at last I inspected the place where the deed was said to have been committed, the old woman’s body had been so much eaten up by jackals, &c., as to be no longer recognisable as to which sex it belonged, I left the matter alone. Herridge in the meantime stoutly denied to all that he had committed the crime. About a month afterwards he expressed a wish to leave the corps and rejoin the police. Knowing his, to say the least of it, uncomfortable position, I allowed him to do so, giving him letters stating the services he had rendered during the war, to facilitate his readmission into the police force, from whence he had in reality deserted. This is one instance of the many _laches_ which occurred in my corps, and which, as the authorities took no positive notice of it, I was only too glad to pretend to ignore. On my return to England in the following spring, I was asked, on passing through Graham’s Town, to go and visit a man then lying in the hospital there, and who had formerly belonged to my corps. I accordingly went, and found the man to be Sergeant Herridge. I was shocked to see the emaciated state to which his powerful frame had been reduced, and the haggard, shifting look of his once fearless eye. His right hand and arm had withered to the bone; and as he held it propped up with the other before me, he said, “That did it, sir; the Almighty has blasted it; the old woman is revenged. I knew by the look she gave me when dying that all was not settled between us; but she has never left gnawing at that arm since, and now she is sucking away at my brains. Tell me, sir, will she leave me alone when I am dead?” Poor Herridge! His deed was a cruel one, and he suffered cruelly for it. Doctor B---- of the 12th, who attended him, remarked that he had never seen a case in which the power of the mind so visibly affected the body. When first brought under his charge, the man merely complained of rheumatism in the arm, and insisted on the fact that it was drying it up; and in the course of two months, during which he was continually staring at it, it had in effect withered to the bone.