When the Boers in the Free State were unable to stem the advance of the British, General Meyer was compelled to retreat northward to ensure his own safety, but he did it so slowly and systematically that he lost only a few men and was able, now and then, to make bold dashes at the enemy's flying columns with remarkable success. The retreat northward through the Transvaal was fraught with many harassments, but General Meyer joined forces with General Botha east of Pretoria and thereafter the teacher and pupil again fought hand in hand in a common cause. The Free State was not as prolific of generals as the Transvaal, but in Christian De Wet she had one of the ablest as well as one of the most fearless leaders in the Republican ranks. Before he was enlisted to fight for his country De Wet was a farmer, who had a penchant for dealing in potatoes, and his only military training was secured when he was one of the sixty Boer volunteers who ascended the slopes of Majuba Hill in 1881. There was nothing of the military in his appearance; in fact, Christian De Wet, Commandant-General of the Orange Free State in 1900, was not a whit unlike Christian De Wet, butcher of Barberton of 1879, and men who knew him in the gold-rush days of that mining town declared that he was more martial in appearance then as a licensed slayer of oxen than later as a licensed slayer of men. He himself prided himself on his unmilitary exterior, and it was not a little source of satisfaction to him to say that his fighting regalia was the same suit of clothing which he wore on his farm on the day that he left it to fight as a soldier in his country's army. Before the war, De Wet's chief claim to notoriety lay in the fact that he attempted to purchase the entire supply of potatoes in South Africa for the purpose of effecting a "corner" of that product on the Johannesburg market. Unfortunately for himself, he held his potatoes until the new crop was harvested, and he became a bankrupt in consequence. Later he appeared as a potato farmer near Kroonstad, and still later, at Nicholson's Nek in Natal, he captured twelve hundred British prisoners and, incidentally, a large stock of British potatoes, which seemed to please him almost as greatly as the human captives. Although the vegetable strain was frequently predominant in De Wet's constitution, he was not over-zealous to return to his former pastoral pursuits, and continued to lead his commandos over the hills of the eastern Free State long after that territory was christened the Orange River Colony. [Illustration: GENERAL PETER DE WET]