and dinner in one. In that
one-roomed cottage, with a smoking fire on the floor and a heap of
mealie corn-cobs in the corner, there slept that night two Kaffir men,
one Kaffir woman, four Kaffir piccaninnies, four West Australian
officers, one officer of the Guards on the corn-cobs, a quantity of
live poultry, and a dead goat; its sleep, of course, being that from
which there is no awaking. That they were not all stifled before
morning is astonishing, but the fact remains that the goat alone
failed to greet the dawn.

Nearly every man in the camp was that night soaked to the skin, and
for once the Guards made no attempt to sing at or to sing down the
storm. As they apologetically explained at breakfast time, they were
really "too down on their luck" to try. But with my usual good fortune
I managed to pass the night absolutely dry, and that too without
borrowing a corner of that horrid Kaffir cottage. The next night found
us at Brugspruit, close to a colliery, where we stayed a considerable
while, and managed to house ourselves in comparative comfort, that
gradually became near akin to luxury. Here the junior officers
courteously assisted me to shovel up an earthen shelter, with a sheet
of corrugated iron for a roof, and thus protected I envied no
millionaire his marble halls, though my blankets were sometimes wet
with evening dew, and the ground white with morning frost.

[Sidenote: _Obstructives on the Rail._]

During the long halt of the Grenadiers at Brugspruit, the Scots Guards
remained at Balmoral, moving thence to Middelburg, and one of the
Coldstream battalions was detailed to guard the Oliphant River,
station, and bridge, which I crossed when on my way to Middelburg to
conduct a Sunday parade service there; but at the river station the
train tarried too brief a while and the battalion was too completely
hidden on the far side of a rough kopje to permit my gaining even a
passing glance of their camp. In South Africa full often the so-called
sheep and their appointed shepherd found themselves thus unwittingly
forbidden to see each others' face.

A little later on we found the line in possession, not of the Boers,
but of a big drove of horses which seemed bent on proving that they
could outdo even the Boers themselves in the rapidity of their retreat
before an advancing foe. Mile after mile they galloped, but mile after
mile they kept to the track, just in front of our engine, which
whistled piercingly and let