f the English
Commissioner. They visited him in hundreds; but he knew the wonderful
advantage to be gathered from the heightening of the mystery, and the
intensifying of the excitement. He listened to everyone; but he
maintained a gloomy and impassive silence, neither checking the
aspirations of the annexationists, nor dissipating the forebodings of
the farmers.

News arrived that troops were marching towards, and massing on,
Theophilus sought not to alleviate the anxieties of the Government,
nor to quell the now rising alarm amongst the people; he simply sat
still and listened, watching the writhings and stragglings of the
doomed Volksraad, and awaiting a favourable moment to end its
existence.

At length someone determined to ask: 'Was it not possible to avert
this annexation which loomed before every mind, brooding like a
shadow upon the country?' He went to Sir Theophilus; he asked his
question; and at length the oracle spoke. Without moving a muscle of
his wonderfully impassive countenance, without even raising his eyes
to look at the interlocutor, Sir Theophilus calmly murmured: 'It is
too late!--too late!' And so, without the authorization of the home
Government, without the consent of her Majesty's High Commissioner,
without the concurrence of the Volksraad, against the will of
thirty-nine-fortieths of the people, and in defiance of the protest
of their Executive, as Mr. Anthony Trollope puts it, Sir Theophilus
said: 'Then and from thenceforth the Transvaal shall be British
property!' So he put up the Queen's flag.

Now, it is impossible to conceive anything more admirable for its
discretion, more wisely calculated as to the moment of its
occurrence, or more suavely and yet firmly done than this act. There
was not a blow struck, not a shot fired; and the first impulse of
nearly every person in the country, whether in principle opposed to
annexation or not, was to congratulate Sir Theophilus Shepstone on
the skill, tact, and good fortune with which he had put an end to the
excessive anxiety, the mental strain, the fears, hopes, and
expectations by which the whole country was paralyzed. Whether the
annexation be now held to be right or wrong, its execution, so far as
regards the act itself, was an unparalleled triumph of tact, modesty,
and firmness.

It was not discovered at the moment, and it never entered into any
man's mind to consider, that it was the presence in Pretoria of Sir
Theophilus himself that