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wants. In Aliwal of a Sunday I used to see the gorgeously arrayed Kaffir beaux taking out their black young ladies dressed much as you will see some of our own girls in summer time in the popular Cockney wateringplaces-white frocks, stockings, shoes, and gloves, gaudiest of flowery picture hats, and parasols to match. In Basutoland itself at the wedding of a wealthy pair it is not unusual to see the bridegroom in smart frock coat, coloured waistcoat, patent leather shoes, lavender kid gloves, with a flower in his button-hole, while the bride is in magnificent dress with long white train, and with the orthodox veil, orange blossoms, and bouquet. White men of both races now complain that the insolence of some of the Basutos is getting beyond all bounds. Thus some Basutos, trekking with their own waggons, recently outspanned close to a Dutch farmhouse near Wepener, and allowed their cattle to graze in the provision garden and among the young trees, where, of course, they could do considerable damage. The farmer was away, so his wife sent her small boy to drive the cattle out. The Basutos ill-used him, threatened to kill him, stole a quantity of vegetables, and, after inspanning several of the farmer's oxen with their own, decamped with them across the border.

Before the war the native had a wholesome respect for the sjambok of the Dutchman. Now he feels that he is under the protection of the sentimentalists at home, who understand not the black man nor the conditions of life which prevail here, but love to put their humanitarian theories into practice at the expense of the colonists. The black man has many good points, yet he is not a man and a brother, but a child and a savage. Spare the sjambok, spoil the nigger,' is not a motto that will commend itself to certain philanthropists,

but it represents the policy that is the most humane
one in the long run. The Boers kept the natives in
their proper place, but it is a mistake to suppose that
they often treated them with deliberate cruelty. As
far as my experience of the days before the war goes,
the natives, as long as they behaved well, were kindly
treated by their Dutch masters, and were very often
attached to them. It is not firm discipline but the silly
pampering of the black that may lead to future trouble
and bloodshed. Often now, when an insubordinate
native is rebuked or threatened by a Dutchman, he
insults and defies him. 'You Dutch are nobodies now,'
he will cry out; the
are no better than us.

British have beaten you. You
You are slaves. You dare not

touch us now; the British will protect us.'

The natives show as little civility to the British. Now that martial law has been suspended the military authorities, having no power to flog, have a good deal of difficulty in keeping in order their black transport men, who in many cases show an inclination to assault white men on the smallest provocation. It seems somewhat anomalous, by the way, that we should have here a disarmed white population, while a few miles across the Basuto border there is a formidable native nation fully armed. It is estimated that thirty thousand of the Basuto fighting men are supplied with serviceable modern rifles. While I am on this subject I may mention that there is a very mischievous body of men now travelling up and down South Africa. I have heard much of these people, but so far have not come across any of them. These are coal-black American negroes, the emissaries of some coloured missionary society in the United States. They are wandering among the natives here, preaching to them that they are the equals

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of the white men if not their betters, that the land rightly belongs to the natives, and that it is they who should be the lords of it. The ignorant Kaffirs, I am told, are much impressed by the teaching of these educated men, whose skins are so much blacker than their own.

CHAPTER VII

THE WASTE OF WAR-RUINED ROUXVILLE-THE BYWONER'-REPATRIATION

COMMISSIONS-FEELING OF THE ORANGE RIVER COLONY

BOERS-BOER

OPINION OF LORD MILNER-A' BYWONER'S' FARM-FORTITUDE OF RUINED BOERS-THE FIGHT AT BUSHMAN'S KOP-END OF THE TREK.

ON our second day out from Aliwal we halted as usual during the heat of noon, and from the waggons we looked out on what was a very typical scene of this wasted land. We were outspanned near the bank of a spruit, at times a raging torrent, but now quite dry save for a few small scattered pools left by the last rains, whose hot, almost opaquely-brown water was all we had to drink. But, untempting though it was to the eye, it was quite palatable, especially after it had been cooled in our canvas bottles, and it was no doubt perfectly wholesome, as most water is on the open veldt except in time of war. At some distance beyond the spruit stretched one of those long rocky ridges that the Boers knew so well how to defend. At the foot of the ridge was a ruined farmhouse set among trees, and not far from it was a heap of fallen bricks that before the war had been a large flour mill. The flat veldt between us and the ridge was intersected by broken fences of entangled wire and strewn with the skeletons of cattle, while it sparkled all over with the innumerable flashing reflections from the empty tins that had contained our soldiers' rations. There was no cultivation, and not a human being nor a living beast in sight. Nothing more utterly desolate or more eloquent of the waste of war

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could be imagined. But later in the afternoon, before we inspanned, our eyes gazed on a clear sign of the return of peace and of hope for the devastated land. First we perceived in the direction from which we had come a great cloud of dust rising. Gradually it neared us, and we heard from out of it the sound of multitudinous bleating. Then the sheep themselves appeared in view, some thousands of them, which when they came to the edge of the spruit threw themselves eagerly down the slopes in search of water. Then the great mob passed us, and, driven by the Kaffir boys, swept on across the veldt towards the north-east. A mounted Dutchman was in charge of the sheep, which he told us had been purchased in the Cape Colony by several large farmers of the district, who were about to restock their farms with them.

The same evening's trek brought us to the one village between Aliwal and Wepener, a distance of eighty-four miles by the waggon road. This was illfated Rouxville, a prosperous little place before the war, having a white population of about five hundred souls. The district of which it is the centre supplied a commando to Olivier's force at the beginning of the conflict. The burghers surrendered and took the oath of allegiance under Lord Roberts's protection proclamation in March 1900, but proved faithless, and again fought against us. Thrice was the district thoroughly cleared by our columns, and the village was practically destroyed. I saw but little of Rouxville; for we passed through it in the midst of a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by torrential rain. It was only a little after nine o'clock at night, but the inhabitants had apparently gone to bed. Not a light was visible in the windows, and in the darkness of the storm, as our waggons