was enigmatical to the British mind.  They seemed metaphorically to defy all Europe and America.  And the reply received by the Consuls was quite in accord with a consciousness on the Boer side of “splendid isolation.”  It suggested that they (the Boers) would esteem it a privilege to provide the protesters with an escort to convey them to a place of safety, if that would satisfy.  It did not satisfy, and there the correspondence ceased.

It was thus the week ended—­the enemy active, vigorous, supercilious; while we in Kimberley felt fretful, hungry, and sick at heart; but too thoroughly inured to hardship to shrink from or even to question the duty of fighting the battle to the bitter end.

CHAPTER XVI

Week ending 3rd February, 1900

The fierceness of the assault to which we had been exposed was the great subject of discussion, but it was not until the sluggish pendulum of Siege time had again swung round to the Sabbath that we freely and without dread of interruption gave full expression to our feelings towards the foe.  The inconsistency of a nation so profuse in Christian professions was much discussed, and ignoring our own shortcomings in the same respect, to say nothing of the essential cruelty of all wars, we readily requisitioned our best resources of invective—­to show what charity really was.  We had been living in stormy tea-cups for a long while; our fury was usually more ungovernable than this or that grievance warranted; but we had never before given way to such rhetorical excesses, against not only the Boers, but the Military, as well—­Lord Methuen, the Mayor, the Colonel and his Staff.  Even Lord Roberts was snapped at.  They were all in turn metaphorically tarred and feathered.

But these, after all, were old offenders; their faults and idiosyncrasies had been reviewed often.  The occasion demanded a new scapegoat; and we determined to find him.  We looked across the broad expanse of veld and bitterly reflected on a destiny that circumscribed our freedom within the barriers of a town; that denied us even the wild freshness of morning uncontaminated by the miasma of city streets.  In this frame of mind we easily drifted into speculation on first causes.  We began to ask ourselves upon whose shoulders the blame primarily rested for conditions which made such slavery possible; how it came to pass that a few toy-guns and a handful of soldiers had been deemed sufficient to protect Kimberley; and finally to vote the error of judgment incompatible with good administration.  And then we remembered that the Bond was a powerful organisation, that a Bond Ministry was in Office.  The needed scapegoat, in the person of the Prime Minister, was thus easily discovered.  He it was who pooh-poohed the necessity of arming Kimberley, and we accordingly lost no time in setting him up in the game of Siege Aunt Sally as a popular