Meanwhile we noted that "fever" trees, with stems of a peculiarly green and bilious hue, abounded on both sides the line; trees so called, not because they produce fever, but because their presence infallibly indicates an area in which fever habitually prevails. Hundreds of the troops that followed us into the fatal valley were speedily fever-stricken, and it is with a sense of devoutest gratitude I record the fact that the Guards' Brigade not only entered Koomati Port without the loss of a single life by bullets, but also left it without the loss of a single life by fever. At first at the foot of every incline we were compelled to pause while our engines, one in front and one behind, got up an ampler pressure of steam, but presently it was suggested that the hundreds of Guardsmen on board the train should tumble out of the trucks and shove, which accordingly they did, the Colonel himself assenting and assisting. So sometimes shoving, always steaming, we pursued our shining way, as we fondly supposed, towards Hyde Park corner and "Home, sweet Home." At Waterval Onder we stayed the night, and I was thus enabled to visit once again the tiny international cemetery, referred to in a former chapter, where I had laid to rest an unnamed, because unrecognised, private of the Devons. Now close beside him in that silent land lay the superbly-built Australian, whom I had so often visited in the adjoining hospital, and whom our general had promised to recommend for "The Distinguished Service Medal." Not yet eighteen, his life work was early finished; but by heroisms such as his has our vast South African domain been bought; and by graves such as his are the far sundered parts of our world-wide empire knit together. [Sidenote: _Ruined farms and ruined firms._] Throughout this whole journey I was painfully impressed not only by the almost total absence of all signs of present-day cultivation, even where such cultivation could not but prove richly remunerative, but also by the still sadder fact that many of the farmhouses we sighted were in ruins. Along this Delagoa line, as in other parts of the Transvaal, there had been so much sniping at trains, and so many cases of scouts being fired at from farmhouses over which the white flag floated, that this particular form of retribution and repression, which we none the less deplored, seemed essential to the safety of all under our protection; and in defence thereof I heard quoted, as peculiarly appropriate to the Boer temperament and tactics, the familiar lines:-- Softly, gently, touch a nettle, And it stings you for your pains; Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as silk remains.