er with unimpaired digestive mechanism. Otto's Kopje
was assailed during the day, and havoc was played with a few
trucks--rusted with ease--at the railway station.

The inevitable calm which precedes a storm was felt on Wednesday. The
morning passed quietly. Whispers of imminent woe were painfully common.
Rumour, subordinating love, ruled "the Court, the camp, the grove." It
was not literally defined, this surpassing evil; its exact nature was
locked up in the breasts of the Authorities. Hours rolled by;
dinner-time (the _time_ for dinner) passed; sufficient for the day is
the evil thereof; we were beginning to think that we had received the
day's allotment, when a boom rang through the startled air! Now, a boom
(in warfare) is not an harmonious note; but one gets accustomed to
discord as to most other things. It was not the boom that was strange;
it was the loud, unearthly chord it seemed to strike; the dread whiz
which followed; which blanched faces, and sent the timid housemaid
diving beneath the bed out of harm's way. Was it an earthquake?--the
buildings shook. A fearful crash dissipated the notion. A fearful crash,
indeed; but a material sound--a relief from its weird, unnerving
prelude. Individuals living miles apart asserted that the missile had
seemed to shoot past their ears. Yet one shell had caused all the
tumult. The awful whiz was repeated again and again. The great six-inch
gun from Mafeking had started its work of destruction. The crisis had
come. The last and bloodiest act of the tragedy had begun--with no
knowledge on our side that it _was_ the last, to sustain us.

It had come without warning; when the heat was insufferable, and the
town a veritable Sahara as regards facilities for quenching thirst; when
the tension was at its worst; when sickness, disease, and death were
busiest. It had come, in fine, with a crown for the sorrows of
Kimberley.

From an artist's point of view a town with high stone buildings would
have offered better raw material for picturesque ruins. In Kimberley we
had but one substantial building that would meet the necessities of the
case, viz., the City Hall. It was the only imposing structure we could
boast of, and was by consequence the harder to hit, albeit some
creditable tries were made to hit it. Large holes were dug in the Market
Square, in which process of grave-digging by storm a little girl was
injured--not by a shell, but by the volley of small pebbles it
displaced.