This morning I sent you a wire to tell you that I had got my commission, thinking thereby to impress you with the importance of the event. The past five months of trooper life have not passed unpleasantly. There have been the inconveniences and hardships of the moment, "les petites miseres de la vie militaire," which sound trifling enough, but are rather a tax on one's endurance sometimes. The life of a trooper, and especially of a scout, is often a sort of struggle for existence in small ways. You have to care for and tend your pony, supplement his meagre ration by a few mealies or a bundle of forage, bought or begged from some farm and carried miles into camp; watch his going out and coming in from grazing; clean him when you can, and have an eye always to his interests. Your life and work depend so entirely on your pony that this soon becomes an instinct with you. Then there are your own wants to be supplied. You will be half starved often if you can't raise something to put in your pocket--eggs from a Kaffir, or a fowl, or a loaf of bread. Then there is the cooking question. Wood is scarce; unless you or your pal have an eye to this, you may go supperless for want of a fire. Another scarcity is water. Very likely there will be none nearer than a mile from camp, and this means a weary tramp after a long day. Then what about your bedding? You can carry only a blanket or greatcoat on your horse, so that, when you are away from your convoy, which is often enough, you have not much covering, and if it comes on to rain you have a poor time of it. Of clothes, too, you have only what you ride in. If wet, they dry on you; and few and far between are your chances of washing them. All these things sound and are trifles. A man would think little of them in a sporting expedition in the Himalayas; but after a long time the monotony tells. The heat tells. You are sometimes "a bit slack," and at those times the cooking of your wretched morsel of flesh, or the struggle for a drop of pea-soup coloured water becomes irksome. The little star on your shoulder saves you from all that. You can tell the new commissioned man by the way he has of constantly looking over his shoulder. Poor fellow! he likes to catch the pretty glitter--the "twinkle, twinkle, little star"--that lifts privates' hands to him as they pass. Some one else cooks for him now, and there is the officers' mess cart with a few welcome extras and a merry gathering at meals and a batman to tend the pony (though you keep an eye on that yourself too), and extra clothes and blankets, and a shelter of some sort to sleep under, and a Kaffir boy to put out his washing things when he comes in hot and tired, and altogether life seems, by comparison, a very luxurious and pleasant affair. I am a bit of a democrat, as you know, and all for equality and the rights of man; but now I say, like Mesty, when they made him a butler, "Dam equality now I major-domo."