ions, and that, moreover, a whole carcase, being mostly
skin and bone, sometimes weighed only about twelve pounds. It is quite
true that the scraggy Transvaal sheep would be looked down on and
despised by their fat and far-famed English cousins, especially at
that season of the year when the veldt is as bare and barren as the
Sahara; but it surely is no fault of the British Government that not a
green blade can anywhere be seen during these long rainless months,
and that consequently all the flocks look famished. South African
mutton is, at the best of times, a by no means dainty dish to set
before a king, much less before the wife of a belligerent Boer; but
British officers and men had to feed upon it and be content.

That no fresh beef, however, was by any chance supplied sounded to me
quite a new charge, and set me enquiring as to its accuracy. I
therefore wrote to one of the meat contractors, whom I personally knew
as a man of specially good repute, and in reply was informed that for
seven months he had regularly supplied the refugee camp in his
neighbourhood with fresh beef as well as mutton, neither being always
prime, he said, but the best that in war time the veldt could be made
to yield! Those who hunt for grievances at a time like this can always
find them, though when weighed in the balances they may perchance
prove even lighter than Transvaal sheep.

It is undeniable that the child mortality in these refugee camps has
been high compared with the average that prevails in a healthy English
town. But the South African average, especially during the fever
season, usually reaches quite another figure. A Hollander predikant,
whom I found among our prisoners, told me that he, his wife, and his
three children were all down with fever, but were without physic, and
almost without food, when the English found them in the low country
beyond Pietersburg, and brought them into camp. Nearly all their
neighbours were in the same sad plight, and several died before they
could be moved. In that and similar cases the camp mortality was bound
to be high, but it takes a free-tongued Britisher to assert that it
was the fault of the ever brutal British. In some camps there was an
epidemic of measles, which occasionally occurs even in the happy
homeland; but in the least sanitary refugee camp the mortality was
never so high as in some of our own military fever camps, where the
epidemic raged like a plague, and for many a weary wee