ran, but back they came, steadily and surely. It looked as if" retreat had been sounded. The officers, what few there were left, ran here and there endeavoring to rally them by platoons and companies. A piper-one of the Argyles, I think-tried to tune up his pipes, but his lips were too dry, and a Major placed his own waterbottle in his hand. Soon the screel began. Hey, Johnnie Cope, air ye waukin' yet?" -somebody said that was the tune. The men gathered round him as he stood there playing, marking time with the stamping of his foot. And now the tide was stemmed once more; the men were sifted into regiments and then into companies; for some there were no officers. Parched with thirst and wearied with the long fight, they stood there in the lines mopping their faces and foreheads on their coat-sleeves. All this time the artillery, although practically unsupported, stood their ground, and whether it was from their fire or from the Boers' natural aversion to showing themselves, the enemy did not advance.

In a few minutes there came the second lull of the day. It was between four and five o'clock when the reserves moved down from the hill expecting to go in. Some of the officers bade me a cheerful good-by, and the long line swept on. There was no firing now except distant shots on the extreme right two miles away. The reserves passed by the remnants of some of the Highland regiments, and entered the bushes, where they lay down in a long line less than eight hundred yards from the trenches near the foot of the kopje. For some reason they were not fired upon, and the Argyles and Sutherlands moved up on the left of their line.

The junior subaltern of the Argyles was a friend of mine. We had lunched together and swam in the river, and I had grown to like him hugely. Anxious about his fate, and thinking I could hear some news, I went on to the front. The firing had ceased completely, and the rumor was spreading that the Boers were leaving the trenches. I found Cuthbertson lying in the bush, alive and well. He did not have much to say. The day before he had been a talkative, gay-hearted boy, but now he was a grown man, a soldier who had seen death all around him; that ages men quickly. Three of his regiment had been shot dead on his left hand, and

two on his right; he had the brand of a Mauser bullet across his finger. It was not known whether orders would be given to rush the trenches that night after darkness, or to wait again until early morning, but there was little rush left in the regiments that had borne the brunt of the battle. From the rear the regimental wagons and water-carts were approaching; the men watched their slow advance with expectant eyes.

Wondering how it was that the Boers were leaving us unmolested, I turned my field-glasses on the kopje, and there I saw what I had not seen once during the whole day. I could see the enemy, some on horseback and some on foot, running back through the nek; the sun occasionally glistened upon a rifle-barrel or bit of metal. Half-way up the hill in a hollow the Boer laager showed plainly; some big wagons were moving there. It looked as if the next morning would see the British in possession! The long line of the Guards. swept from the right of the Argyles over to the Field Artillery, and held its post under the slope of the hill.

I started to the rear, and soon passed through the line of oncoming wagons. The water-carts which were in the van were already surrounded by a crowd of jostling Highlanders. Suddenly there came the well-known whirring in the air, and in the only open space in all that crowded plain a shell struck and burst harmlessly. The Boers had mounted a gun! The shot had come almost from the center of their laager. The wagons stopped; the drivers turned the mules about. Again there came the flutter in mid-air, and a shell burst directly over the crowd about the nearest water-cart. It was a straight shot; one Gordon fell killed and six were wounded.

And now there was an orderly drifting backwards of all forces, and a third shell burst overhead, but did no damage. The field battery on our right replied with a single shot-the last fired that day. It was growing dusk. The Highland regiments were returning, but the Scots Guards held their ground. G Company was protecting the battery. And here let me state, what I did not learn until the following morning: the shot they had fired was not only the last one of the battle, but the last one they had! Their horses had been sent

back to the river for water. G Company of the Scots Guards protected those harmless pieces the whole night long. If the Boers had known this and had advanced, nothing could have saved the guns.

The forces halted some two miles in the rear of what had been their advanced position, and went into camp. Until long Until long after midnight stragglers kept coming in. At roll-call, in the Black Watch alone, three hundred and seventy-three men failed to answer to their names; but many turned up before morning. At the field hospital on the right the surgeons had no rest. Not a hundred feet from the hospital tents were many new-made shallow graves.

It

I saw poor Captain Wingate and Browning laid away shortly after sunrise, shrouded in their brown blankets. was a sight I shall never forget; a guard of wearied Highlanders presenting arms, two tall officers standing bareheaded, paying the last tribute to their departed friends and comrades, and a lone piper playing the wail that has seen many a good man put under ground-"Lochaber No More." One of the sturdy privates was sobbing loudly, for the attachment of the Highland clans to their leaders remains the same as it did in the old days of the Stewarts.

A truce had been concluded at daybreak, and parties were out searching for the dead and wounded. Three or four big ambulances were lurching about against the sky-line where the hardest fighting had taken place. General Cronje had sent out a Boer doctor, a man of intelligence and humanity. He had little to say of the losses on his side, and as I write they are unknown. But it was rumored that one lyddite shell had killed or wounded some seventy-eight men—almost a whole commando. Unfortunately, the naval gun so many miles away opened fire on the kopje; the officers in command had not been informed of the armistice. The shells raised the usual clouds of dust on the face of the bare hill, but did something more: drew the fire of a big Boer gun, a fortypounder that had been mounted during the night. The naval gun fired four shots, the Boer gun three, one at the armored train that had crept down the track; and then all was silence until eleven o'clock, when the Guards marched back from their

shelter, escorting the guns they had been so bravely protecting.

Thus ended the battle of Magersfontein. Nearly eight hundred brave soldiers of the Queen, one General, and fifty-six officers had fallen before that awful rifle fire. It had been fine shooting for the Boers, a grand battue !

Late on Tuesday afternoon I attended the burial of General Wauchope. Near where he lay were the graves of seven other officers, and in a huge trench in the rear were placed the bodies of twentyseven Black Watch, dressed just as they had fallen, and further back fifteen Seaforths and some Argyles and Sutherlands, with a few of the Highland Light Infantry. Chaplain Robertson made a most impressive prayer. The pipes wailed again, and back to their tents to rest marched the Highland Brigade. Only one Colonel left in four regiments; some companies with only one or two officers! Many tents held less than half the men they had sheltered two nights before.

A

And now what is the result? In a nut. shell, this: No matter how many men it may cost (and it will take many of her best and bravest), England will win; but, beyond doubt, long before this sees print, she will have changed her methods of fighting. It is useless to use brave men as if bravery were their only weapon. half-grown lad of sixteen, filled with the spirit of a fighting ancestry, with his cheek laid close to the butt of a Mauser, lying intrenched and invisible, is as good, as I said before, as five brave Highlanders advancing out of the open. The Boers have learned this, and the British are gaining their knowledge at dear cost. Perhaps in the next actions to come we may see some efforts at investment or flank-turning. The Boer knows his ground, and his style of fighting suits it. The methods of Quatre-Bras and Waterloo belong to the bygone age. The English troops are neither demoralized nor frightened. But England has just begun to realize the bigness of the work. It is serious business. It is no little war. Colony, as I write, is full of slumbering sedition. Rebellion was nipped in the bud and is now held in check only by stringent measures. The triumph of the Dutch Africander would mean the extinç, tion of English-speaking influence.

Cape

I

T seems to me that there is something picturesque in Dr. Martineau's biography from the very beginning. To us Unitarians at least, Norwich in England is a place of special interest. Henry Bathurst, the Bishop of Norwich when Martineau was born, was one of the real free-lances of the English Church-the only liberal bishop of his time, and, to speak frankly, as good a Unitarian as there is to-day. But Norwich had also been from an early time the center of the Unitarian heresy in England, and in one of the old Unitarian families of Norwich James Martineau was born. I do not know that they had anything to do with Dr. Bathurst, or he with them. After the death of Bishop Bathurst, which took place in 1837, Dr. Stanley, Dean Stanley's father, was made Bishop of Norwich. And in the first volume of Arthur Stanley's life there is a curious note, describing his first introduction to Harriet Martineau, and the surprise with

which he acquainted himself with such people.

The family is French. You could almost guess that, as you read what James Martineau and his sister have written. They were Huguenots, driven from France in 1684. The first emigrant married a French lady-one of his "co-religionists" named Pierre. For a century his descendants were surgeons in Norwich; as soon as there was any Unitarian chapel there they were Unitarians. Thomas Martineau, the father of James, broke the line of surgeons, and became a successful manufacturer of woolen cloths.

He had a large family of children, of whom Harriet was the fifth and James the sixth-born in 1805. I had fancied that she had a great deal to do with his earlier education. But as she was but three years older than he, this can hardly be so. The earlier plans for the boy were that he should be engaged in some work of engineering or other application of

science. But he was at the school of Dr. Lant Carpenter, a distinguished Unitarian of Bristol in England, and he was sent to Manchester New College, which was wholly under Unitarian influences. (Observe that he could not at that time be entered as a student either at Oxford or Cambridge unless he believed in the Athanasian Creed, or said he did.) Quite early in life, therefore, he chose the duty and profession of a minister, in which he continued until his death.

The first which we heard of him in America was as one of a little cluster of three men who were our Unitarian ministers in Liverpool in the year 1839. I have forgotten the details of the almost chivalrous contest in which these three gentlemen engaged; but I know this, that a half-dozen, more or less, of what were called the Evangelical churches undertook to have some sermons or meetings for the purpose of showing the fallacy of the Unitarian principles of Christianity. These three men, Martineau, Taylor, and Giles, announced that they would reply week by week to the sermons delivered week by week by their antagonists; and our side of what we call "the Liverpool controversy" is still a book which our oldfashioned people like to refer to.

I do not know, but I suppose that the sermons of Martineau's which we printed in that series called attention to him in England, first among the Unitarian churches, and very soon elsewhere. This was in 1839. He published his first hymnbook the next year, and in 1843 published a volume of sermons, very well known and very much read a generation ago, called "Endeavors after the Christian Life." A second series was published in 1847. To my mind, they are to this hour among his most valuable works. Whoever reads them feels how real a man he is, how complete and practical his faith, and how ready his application to daily life of the most profound spiritual truth.

I heard him myself for the first time in 1859. By this time his name was known and he was honored in England and in our larger England. I find in a letter of my own, written at the time, this account of the service:

So young was the aspect of the preacher that I supposed at first that some younger brother was to read the service and Mr. Mar

tineau or Mr. Taylor to preach. But the reader passed into the pulpit, and then it only needed a sentence to show that it was no 'prentice hand to whom I listened, and that the veritable James Martineau of our enthusiasm was before me. In this country, where the Prime Minister is on the edge of eighty, Mr. Martineau has a right to look as young as if he were in the senior class of a divinity school. I have said that he read the service; it is the Common Prayer considerably abridged. The choir sang the psalms, excepting that the congregation read one of them alternately with him.

Looking back on this letter, I am rather interested in seeing that the sermon

was chiefly directed to a delicate dissection of that secularism which seeks to work for the direct reformation of visible evils so straightforwardly that it neglects the spiritual power which is the only sufficient remedy. "It is the ambition of men to work by sight; it is more often the method of God to lead them by ways they have not known."

From that time to this time I have always seen Dr. Martineau, if it were possible, when I was in England, and, like all men who have met with him, I look back with the greatest pleasure on every interview. I heard a friend say last week that he never liked to write on a subject which Martineau had handled, because Martineau's work and thought were so finished that no one else had any right to speak after him. The remark threw me back on memories of his daily conversation, indeed of his daily life, so far as such a stranger could see it. He seemed interested in everything, and yet he spoke of nothing superficially. You felt that he gave his whole attention through and through to the matter he had in hand.

Some one told me that he fitted up at one time a laboratory in his house, where he could himself repeat the crucial or critical experiments in chemistry on which were founded one of the steps forward in the science of the time; perhaps it was at the time when the " correlation of forces" was brought forward-that is the way it lies in my memory. When the Clarendon Press at Oxford made a very absurd blunder by publishing, as "Origen's Philosophumene," Hippolytus's treatise on Heresies, I suppose there were perhaps ten men in England who at once detected the error. Of the ten, Martineau was the one who published the article which discusses the whole subject and makes the whole business absolutely clear. Here