lling places with a heavy frown
that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw
the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there
sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded
community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be
crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the
cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.

Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic
fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day,
and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome
aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction
to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his
voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong,
resonant, masculine:

"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and
carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"

Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the
destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to
be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took
the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook
out the twisted thong.

"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"

A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They
won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their
mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."

The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking,
crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies
for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the
crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue
dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal
display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and
the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu
the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that
such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and
his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his
fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.

The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours
filled the air as the singing lash per