greener, and there was grass in places, varied by occasional oases of little light-green trees surrounding a farmhouse, or an artificial pond fed by a Yankee wind pump.

Field rats and mice, lizards, chameleons, and an occasional large bird scuttled out of sight; frequent ant-hills, two or three feet high and half as thick, dotted the veldt with their brick-red colour, and we saw a few stately ostriches, and many herds of goats, sheep, and horses. Of human inhabitants there were only tiny clusters at the far-separated stations. Silence, desolation, vastness, and colour-these were the dominant notes of the region.

Not many weeks before, Orange River consisted of a few railway buildings, and six or eight small stone cottages roofed with corrugated iron-the homes of the railway people. It may have had a fixed popula tion of fifty souls. Now 2,650 soldiers and half as many more servants, drivers, transport hands, and camp followers made the little village swarm and hum with life. The station platform was crowded by soldiers, armed and in full marching order, hung all about with heavy weights, like hooks in a crowded butcher's shop.

It is indeed a marvel that Englishmen can go about so buttoned up, and strapped in, and burdened with equipage, in the intense heat of these latitudes.

Leaving the station we saw tents pitched along one

side of the only street, and other tents standing in the humorous little front gardens, where plants and flowers are kept in paraffin and biscuit tins, as though the people expected to move at short notice, and carry their gardens with them.

The horses of the officers were tethered to the front fences, and in the middle of the street was a group of soldiers working a heliograph-a mirror, like a shavingglass, set up on a tripod, and trembling with the deft touches that one soldier gave to a telegraph key, the while another soldier read to him from a sheet of paper.

Little did we suspect that, as we watched that mirror, it was communicating the orders of General Wood to a British force at that moment entering into an engagement with the Boers twenty miles away.

Having seen the town we inquired for Colonel Gough, and learned that he was out with a patrol across the river, and would return in an hour. We knew that earlier in the week a small force had been riding in a south-easterly direction in the enemy's country, and had returned quickly without an adventure. So, there being nothing new in this situation, we sat down to await the return of the seven hundred Lancers and others who were under Colonel Gough.

It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been smoking and chatting with new military acquaintances for an hour or so, when we noticed a group of

Tommies standing behind two officers, who were scanning the distant veldt with field glasses. Going into the street to see what they were looking at, we discovered that of the few persons to be seen every one was facing and scanning the red-hot veldt-even the Kaffirs and their women and children being outside their huts in the foreground, with their palms up to shield their eyes. Of soldiers there were not twenty within sight. What did it mean? What had happened to depopulate a swarming village in an hour?

It was the hostler to Captain Wright, the local correspondent of the Daily Mail, who answered the question-perhaps with exaggeration, yet in such a manner as to show that no time was to be lost by any energetic man at the scene. "We have heard that the patrol is cut off by a large force of Boers," said he, “and every man-jack in the place-field batteries, infantry, and all -has gone to their relief in the train."

"When did the patrol start out?"

"Yesterday, sir. They're at Belmont now, twenty miles away. I wish I was with them. God send that they'll give the Dutch what they're in need of." "Where is Major-General Wood, to give us permission to hurry after the troops?"

"In the station, sir."

And there we found him--a small, well-knit, wiry man of apparently sixty, black haired, slightly bald, swarthy, alone in the dining-room, with his sword and

belt flung upon a table, a thousand flies inspecting it, his head held down in thought, his visage that of a man preoccupied and anxious.

"I'd rather you'd see Colonel Money," said he; "he is acting commandant in Colonel Gough's absence." In a tiny stone cottage with "Staff Office" on a painted board before it, we found Colonel Money, of the "Fighting Fifth" (Northumberland Fusiliers), who have been under canvas two years, and have seen Gibraltar, Omdurman, Crete, and Aldershot, yet have known the comforts of a bed at night for only two weeks since 1897.

We saw him in what was somebody's bedroom only a few weeks before, sitting at a table made of planks laid upon wooden trestles, and in three minutes we were trudging along the railway to the river. The fringe of bright green trees, like willows at home, showed us where it was, a mile and a half away, but the route was between hills on and around all of which were white tents, or camps, upon the veldt. On one hill a man was wig-wagging with flags, on another a "helio" was making microscopic lightning flashes, on another men in khaki lounged among rocks scarcely more plentiful than themselves.

At last the land fell away, and a great iron bridge, painted red, took the place of the railway. When the river is swollen this great bridge is doubtless needed to span it, but now two-thirds of its length arched a

field of dry caked mud, from which on all sides sprang a myriad trees and bushes. A sentinel on foot, backed by many men lounging near, demanded our passes, and permitted us to continue across the bridge, once but partially floored with open trestle work, but now covered with planks for the passage of troops.

From its middle we were able to look up and down the historic Orange River. The water in it was not above 75 feet wide, and looked very shallow. In character it was like the Missouri or Lower Mississippi, bordered by a wide, dry bed, cut up by little islands and sand-bars, and fretted by upturned trees, snags, and sun-baked débris. Far off to the west its banks came closer together, and were so clothed with green that for a moment we drank in that view, and thought of the Thames at Wargrave.

At the far end of the red series of trusses a corporal and squad of men suddenly materialised, and demanded our passes very much as if we had not passed through the other end of the bridge, but had been born in the middle of it, and had stayed there till we grew to formidable proportions.

Before us, instead of the veldt, were some considerable hills, so stony as to appear like huge heaps of black boulders, with the shining metals of the railway dodging between and around them.

"Go up on that hill," said the corporal, "and, maybe, you will see the fighting. I wish to goodness I