It was an admirably fitting prelude to another historic event of that same week. On the last anniversary we shall ever keep of our venerable Queen's birthday, on May 24th, the Orange River Colony was formally annexed to the British Empire, and Victoria was proclaimed its gracious sovereign. That empire has grown into the vastest responsibility ever laid on the shoulders of any one people, and constitutes a stupendously urgent call to the pursuit and practice of righteousness on the part of the whole Anglo-Saxon race. It is a superb stewardship entrusted to us of God; and "it is required in stewards that they be found faithful." [Sidenote: _Over the Vaal at last._] All that week the Guards continued in hot pursuit of the Boers without so much as once catching sight of them. Repeatedly, however, we scrambled through huge patches of Indian or Kaffir corn, enough, so to say, to feed an army, but all left to rot and perish uncut. It was one of the few evidences which just then greeted us that war was really abroad in the land, and that they were no mere autumn manoeuvres in which we then were taking part. Some of the rightful owners of that corn were probably among our prisoners of war at St Helena, spending their mourning days in vainly wondering how long its hateful unfamiliar waves would keep them captive. Others had, perchance, themselves been garnered by the great Harvester, who ever gathers his fattest sheaves hard by the paths of war. Occasionally we came, in the course of our march, on a recently-deserted Boer camp, with empty tins strewn all about the place and the embers of camp fires still glowing, but never so much as a penny worth of loot lying on the ground. Either they had little to leave, or else they so utilised the railway in assisting to get their belongings away that in that respect they had the laugh of us continually. This final service rendered, the Boers made haste to prevent the rail being used by us; and so far as time or timidity would permit, they blew up every bridge, every culvert, as soon as their last train had crossed it. Fortunately of the long and beautiful bridge across the Vaal we found only one broad span broken. About nine o'clock on Sunday morning the troops reached Val Joen's Drift, the terminal station on the Orange Free State Railway. This drift it was that President Kruger had once resolved to close against all traffic in order the more effectually to strangle British trade in the Transvaal. Another mile or two through prodigiously deep sand, brought us to the Vaal River coal mines, with their great heaps of burning cinders or other refuse, which brought vividly to many a north countryman's remembrances kindred scenes in the neighbourhood of busy Bradford and prosperous Sunderland.