ove and endured and suffered, to what a
glorious end?

Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate synopses. Not so I, who,
out of all the wreaths that Fame holds yet in her lap to give away, shall
never call one laurel mine....

A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night upon the Links at
Herion, burdened with this story it had to tell. Before then it had only
blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some
whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous,
electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic,
racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at
Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it
spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth
any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly sighing, in the giant blue
shadow of Table Mountain; it blew at Johannesburg, six thousand feet above
sea-level, in a raging cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring
the celadon-green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of the
Magaliesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in
the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I write, this
variable spring day. But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy
mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave
birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences
nightly patrolled a Sentinel who never slept.

Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty, to see the troops march
in by the cold white morning moonlight that painted long indigo-blue
shadows of marching horsemen and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and
huge-teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.

I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and Barala,
Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and
were glad and rejoiced. But of these haggard men and emaciated women of
British race I can but say that in them human joy attained the climax of a
sacred frenzy--that human gratitude and enthusiasm, loyalty and
patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the thermometer of
human emotion ceases to record altitudes.

At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and the flag of
the United Republics had fluttered down from the tree whence it had waved
so long, and the Union Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the
retre