in the picket-lines, causing a vast loss of temper at unharnessing.  After unharnessing and feeding horses, which you have to look sharp about, or you will miss coffee, every one crowds round the cook’s fire, and looks with hungry eyes at the pots.  Coffee or tea, biscuits and tinned meat, are served out.  You are ravenous, as you have lived on chance scraps during the day.  Then you make your bed, stretching your blankets behind your harness, standing a saddle on end, and putting a feed-bag behind it for a pillow.  Next morning’s feeds have first to be made up, and then you sleep like a log, if you can, that is.  I generally have to get up at least once, and walk about for the cold.  Fellows who are lucky enough to have fuel make small fires (an anthill provides a natural stove), and cook soup, but it’s hard to spare the water, which is as precious as gold in this country.  Besides, drivers are badly placed for such luxuries; their work is only begun when camp is reached, while gunners can go off and find beds under waggons, etc.  It is the same all day, except, of course, in action, when the gunners have all the work.  At all halts we have to be watching a pair of horses, which have manifold ways of tormenting one.  To begin with, they are always hungry, because they get little oats and no hay.  One of mine amuses himself by chewing all leather-work in his reach, especially that on the traces, and has to be incessantly worried out of it.  The poor brutes are standing all the time on rich pasture, and try vainly to graze.  They are not allowed to, as it involves taking out big bits, undoing wither straps, etc., and you have to be ready to start at a moment’s notice.  There are thousands of acres of rich pasture all about, vast undeveloped wealth.  Farms are very few and far between; mostly dismal-looking stone houses, without a trace of garden or adornment of any sort.  There was a load off all our minds this night, for the H.A.C. had at last been in action and under fire.  All went well and steadily.  My friend Ramsey, the lead-driver of our team, brushed his teeth at the usual intervals.  I don’t believe anything on earth would interfere with him in this most admirable duty.  He does it with miraculous dexterity and rapidity at the oddest moments, saying it rests him!

June 27.—­Up at 3.45 and harnessed, but it was almost dawn before our unwieldy convoy creaked and groaned into motion.  We are rearguard to-day, with some Yeomanry, Australians, and Buffs, but just now we were ordered up to the front, trotted past the whole convoy, and are now in action; limbers and waggons halted behind a rise.  The Boers have guns in action to-day, and a shell of theirs has just burst about 400 yards to our right, and others are falling somewhere near the guns ahead.  It seems to be chiefly an artillery duel so far, but a crackling rifle fire is going on in the distance.