tion, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military
organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by
civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens
and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever
evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by
cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly
ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun'
to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to
make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while
lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour
with the Land League.

Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by
side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many
had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and
not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give
his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for "Hi!" When the men
had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, "Come on;
let's be going," and slouch away.

P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more
than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the
duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the
performance of other duties of the domestic kind.

He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon,
polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English
being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free
Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.

"Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me,"
said Van Busch. "I have something to say to you about my sister that
married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."

You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the
sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth
tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and
carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long
hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas
pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he
accurately resembled ten thousand other men.

But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of