What a spectacle the town presented! Business, as I have stated, had
been entirely suspended since the Friday; but it was not until Monday
that the last vestige of life appeared to have passed away from
Kimberley. Meandering the streets for curiosity or in futile search of
corporal sustenance, it was not until then that the hush of the
thoroughfares struck one in its full intensity. The whole machinery of
man's work and operations was at a standstill. The shops were closed; no
car rattled o'er the stony street; no throb of life was anywhere. A
belated cat, a stranger to milk and mice, and with tail still erect as a
lamp-post to accentuate the body's decay, would now and then cross the
tile-line. The houses wore a funereal aspect. The cabs, enrobed in Red
Crosses, awaited an unwelcome fare--a mangled pedestrian. Spectral
horseman rode hither and thither in pursuit of shells, to aid the
victims of their wrath. A stillness, weird, uncanny, hovered like a pall
above the Diamond City.

... now the sounds of population fail,
No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale,
No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread,
For all the bloomy flush of life is fled.

The plucky manner in which "we" had risked our necks for our readers'
sakes had won golden enconiums for the _Diamond Fields' Advertiser_.
Monday's issue was awaited with unwonted eagerness, interested as we
were in the gauntlet flung at Lennox Street. But the gauntlet had been
taken up; there was no paper forthcoming; it was suppressed; the
"Military Situation" proscribed its freedom. This was not altogether
unexpected; but a more prudent counsel would have let the Press alone.
Several stories appertaining to Saturday's outburst were in circulation.
One was that the Editor had been handcuffed and conveyed to
gaol--presumably for seditious libel. But Mr. Rhodes, it was said, had
intervened and offered himself as a "substitute." He would take
responsibility for the famous article; if anybody was to be punished
_he_ would act as criminal. The story ran, however, that he was let off
with a caution--a sentence at once magnanimous and supremely prudent.

Another night assault had been considered probable, but there was no
firing until Tuesday morning when the bombardment was briskly resumed.
Throughout the day the attack was well sustained, despite the strategy
of our "snipers." Shells crashed in close proximity to vacated houses;
half a dozen were broken into;