ition at the top, overlooking
the bridge, so as to cover the convoy while it descended and crossed.
An attack seems likely,--a curious birthday treat!--4 P.M.--Nothing
has happened. An interminable procession of ox and mule-waggons files
down the pass; it is a much larger convoy than I thought, and must
have received additions since we started. At this rate we shall be
ages getting to Lindley.

One no longer wonders at the slowness of an army's movement out here.
The standard of speed is the trek-ox, lurching pensively along under
his yoke, very exacting about his mealtimes, and with no high notions
about supreme efforts, when he has to get his waggon out of a bad
drift. He often prefers to die, and while he is making up his
ponderous mind he may be blocking up a column, miles in length, of
other waggons in single file. We talk of the superior mobility of the
Boers; but it puzzles me to know how they got it, for oxen and mules
are their standards of speed too, I suppose.

At dark, when all had passed, we followed ourselves down an abominably
dangerous road, and over the bridge to camp, which looked and sounded
like a big busy town, scintillating with fires and resonant with the
yells of black drivers packing their waggons.

_June 26_--_Eight A.M._--We are in action, my waggon at present halted
in the rear. We harnessed up at 3.45 this morning, and marched some
miles to the top of another hill, overlooking another plain, a
crescent of steep kopjes on the left, occupied by Boers. The convoy
halted just as a spattering rifle-fire ahead struck on the still
morning air (it was just dawn), and the chatter of a Maxim on the left
flank. We were all rather silent. A staff-officer galloped up,
"Walk,--March," "Trot," rang out to the Battery, and we trotted ahead
down the hill, plunged down a villainous spruit, and came up on to the
level, under a pretty heavy fire from the kopje on our left. For my
part, I was absorbed for these moments in a threatened mishap to my
harness, and the dread of disgrace at such an epoch. My off horse had
lost flesh in the last few days, and the girth, though buckled up in
the last hole, was slightly too loose. We had to gallop up a steep bit
of ascent out of the drift, and to my horror, the pack-saddle on him
began to slip and turn, so I had to go into action holding on his
saddle with my right hand, in a fever of anxiety, and at first
oblivious of anything else. Then I noticed the whing of bullet