to supper and breakfast.

HUNTING AND HUNTED.

ORANGE RIVER COLONY.

There is a funny side to pretty nearly every kind of tragedy if one only
has the humorous edge of his nature sufficiently well developed to see it.
Not that the humour is always apparent at the time--that comes later. I am
led to these reflections as I watch Lieutenant "Jack" Brabant, of the
Scouts, dancing a wild war dance round our little camp fire. He is a
picturesque figure in the firelight, this thirty-year-old son of the
renowned General Brabant, ten stone weight I should say, all whipcord and
fencing wire, rather a hard-faced man; no feather-bed frontiersman this,
but a tough, hard-grained bit of humanity, who has fought niggers and
hunted for big game at an age when most young fellows are thinking more of
poetry and pretty faces than of hard knocks and harder sport. I know him
for a rattling good shot at either man or beast, a fine bushman, and a
dandy horseman. He is a rather quiet fellow, as a rule, but all the
quietness is out of him to-night, and he only wants to be stripped of his
tight yellow jacket, cord breeches, leather gaiters, soft slouch hat with
green puggaree, and then, given a coat of black paint, he would pass well
for some warrior chief doing a death dance in the smoke. He is boiling with
passion, his left fist, clenched hard as the head of an axe, moves up and
down, in and out, like the legs of a kicking mule midst a crowd of
cart-horses. In his right he swings his Mauser carbine, and a man don't
need to be a descendant of a race of prophets to know that something has
gone gravely wrong with the lieutenant, otherwise he would not be making a
circus of himself in this fantastic fashion.

I lay my pencil aside for a minute or two to catch what he is saying, and
when I have got the hang of the story I don't wonder he feels as mad as a
wooden-legged man on a wet mud-bank. He had been out all day since the very
break of dawn with a couple of scouts, searching the kopjes for a notorious
Boer spy, whose cleverness and audacity had made him a thorn in our side.
If there was a man in the British lines capable of running the "slim" Boer
to earth, that man was Lieutenant Jack Brabant. It had been a grim hunt,
for the spy was worthy of his reputation, and the pursuers had to move with
their fingers on their triggers, and a rash move would have meant