g the streets with their precious
rifles, evidently feeling such a sense of security as they had never
experienced before.

On the Sunday I alluded to, after our ride we attended morning service,
held as usual in the neat little church, which, with the exception of a
few gashes in the ceiling rafters, caused by fragments of shell, had up
to date escaped serious injury. The Dutch Church, on the other hand,
curiously enough, was almost demolished by shell-fire at the beginning
of the siege. We then drove up to the hospital, where Miss Hill, the
plucky and youthful-looking matron, received us and showed us round.
This girl--for she was little more--had been the life and prop of the
place for the past two months, during which time the resources of the
little hospital had been taxed almost past belief. Where twenty was the
usual number of patients, there were actually sixty-four on the occasion
of my first visit. The staff was composed of only a matron and three
trained nurses. In addition to their anxieties for the patients, who
were being so frequently brought in with the most terrible injuries,
these nurses underwent considerable risks from the bombardment, which,
no doubt from accident, had been all along directed to the vicinity of
the hospital and convent, which lay close together. The latter had
temporarily been abandoned by the nuns, who were living in an adjacent
bomb-proof, and the former had not escaped without having a shell
through one of the wards, at the very time a serious operation was
taking place. By a miraculous dispensation no patient was injured, but a
woman, who had been previously wounded by a Mauser bullet while in the
laager, died of fright.

The afternoon was taken up by a sort of gymkhana, when a happy holiday
crowd assembled to see the tilting at the ring, the lemon-cutting, and
the tug-of-war. At this entertainment Colonel Baden-Powell was
thoroughly in his element, chatting to everyone and dispensing tea from
a travelling waggon. In the evening I dined at Dixon's with our old
party, and, really, the two months that had elapsed since I was at that
same table had effected but little change in the surroundings and in the
fare, which at that early stage of the siege was as plentiful as ever,
even the stock of Schweppes' soda-water appearing inexhaustible. Besides
this luxury, we had beautiful fresh tomatoes and young cabbages. The
meat had resolved itself into beef, and beef only, but eggs helped