better than the Cafe de Paris, and the general
agreement that Ritz cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being
robbed. That is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle. We
heard no galloping aides, no clanking spurs, only the click of the
clipped billiard balls as the American scouts (who were killed thirty-six
hours later) knocked them about the torn billiard-cloth, the drip, drip
of the kerosene from a blazing, sweating lamp, which struck the dirty
table-cloth, with the regular ticking of a hall clock, and the complaint
of the piano from the hotel parlor, where the correspondent of a Boston
paper was picking out "Hello, My Baby," laboriously with one finger. War
is not so terribly dramatic or exciting--at the time; and the real trials
of war--at the time, and not as one later remembers them--consist largely
in looting fodder for your ponies and in bribing the station-master to
put on an open truck in which to carry them.

We were wakened about two o'clock in the morning by a loud knocking on a
door and the distracted voice of the local justice of the peace calling
upon the landlord to rouse himself and fly. The English, so the voice
informed the various guests, as door after door was thrown open upon the
court-yard, were at Ventersburg Station, only two hours away. The
justice of the peace wanted to buy or to borrow a horse, and wanted it
very badly, but a sleepy-eyed and sceptical audience told him unfeelingly
that he was either drunk or dreaming, and only the landlady, now
apparently refreshed after her labors, was keenly, even hysterically,
intent on instant flight. She sat up in her bed with her hair in curl
papers and a revolver beside her, and through her open door shouted
advice to her lodgers. But they were unsympathetic, and reassured her
only by banging their doors and retiring with profane grumbling, and in a
few moments the silence was broken only by the voice of the justice as he
fled down the main street of Ventersburg offering his kingdom for a
horse.

The next morning we rode out to the Sand River to see the Boer positions
near the drift, and met President Steyn in his Cape cart coming from them
on his way to the bridge. Ever since the occupation of Bloemfontein, the
London papers had been speaking of him as "the Late President," as though
he were dead. He impressed me, on the contrary, as being very much alive
and very much the President, although his executive chamber wa