written instructions in the general's missive.

"Let it rip," was the laconic reply from the brigadier. "With this
crowd of Vermaas's hanging about I am not going to risk patrols other
than cyclists, and I am certainly not going to push on in force!" This
was final, and the extended front of the brigade opened out across the
veldt, throwing out its feelers like the tentacles of some slowly
crawling monster. Through highland and lowland it wound, rummaging the
isolated farmsteads, ploughing through ravine and mealie patch. But
though wild-fowl rose chattering, and, scolding bitterly, circled
round the scouts, though springbok trotted leisurely away from the
front of each several column, though sullen girls and gaping Kaffirs
peered from beneath the eaves of farmsteads, no sign of hostility was
to be found in all this life. It was the same old monotonous drudgery
of the veldt again. The same merciless sun, the same sapless and
parched surroundings. As the day wore on men longed for the crack of a
rifle to ease the burden of the monotony. The country, too, grew more
hilly, and fearing that he might be attacked in detail, the brigadier
reduced his front, till by four in the afternoon the brigade to all
practical purposes had concentrated. Then it was that the
advance-guard struck a great white road, ankle-deep in dust. This
veldt track was so rigid in its alignment, that for the moment it
might have been taken for a turnpike road fallen upon decadent days.
But the local colour of its surroundings did not support the
comparison, and the reason of its being loomed up gauntly in the
middle distance. A great square of whitewashed building, which,
strange to relate, was overshadowed by quite a number of trees, giving
it an appearance not unlike the first attempt which a Bengali merchant
makes at a country residence, when success in commerce renders it
imperative that he should improve the circumstances of his dwelling.
But though in the first instance the general appearance of the farm
was forbidding, yet, on examination, it presented several qualities
which are valuable to the soldier. An infant _barrage_ closing the
drainage slope in a depression formed an artificial water-pan of no
mean dimensions. A pair of zinc-fanned windmills worked two artesian
wells with such success that the purest drinking-water abounded; and
the result of all this moisture was the nearest attempt at a lawn that
any single man in the brigade has seen