At the Orange River a corporal of the Yorkshire Light Infantry received a pocket copy of the New Testament from a Christian worker, and placed it in his tunic by the side of his "field dressing." A godless man, who had been driven into the army by heavy drinking, he merely glanced at a verse or two, and then forgot its very presence in his pocket till he reached the battlefield of Graspan a few days later on. Then a Boer bullet passed right through the Testament and the dressing that lay beside it, was thereby deflected from its otherwise fatal course, and finally made a long surface wound on his right thigh. That wound he at once bound up with one of his putties, but for two hours was unable to stir from the place where he fell. Then he managed to limp back to his battalion, and piteously begged his adjutant not to let his name be put down on the casualty list, for, said he, "my mother is in feeble health, and if she saw my name in the papers among the wounded she would worry herself almost to death, as years ago when she heard of my being hit in Tirah." That brave request was granted, and he remained in the ranks marching as one unwounded. Yet neither this Providential deliverance nor the terrors that soon followed at Modder River sufficed to lure to either prayer or praise this godless, but surely not graceless, corporal. On the 27th of August, however, which happened to be his thirtieth birthday, a devout sergeant had the joy of winning him to Christian decision; and that day, as he told me in Pretoria, he resolved to find out for himself whether after thirty years of misery the mercy of the Lord could provide for him thirty years of happiness. [Sidenote: _No canteens and no crime._] On board the _Nubia_, amid piles of literature put on board for the amusement of the troops during the voyage, I discovered a quantity of pamphlets entitled "Beer Cellars and Beer Sellers," the purpose of which was to prove that the beer sellers were England's most indispensable patriots; that the beer cellars were England's best citadels; and that the beer trade in general was the very backbone of England's stability. It was horribly tantalising to the men in face of such teaching to find that there had been placed on board for them not so much as a solitary barrel of this much belauded beverage. Through all the voyage every man remained perforce a total abstainer. Yet there was not a single death among those sixteen hundred, nor a solitary instance of serious sickness. What does Burton say to that?