target for our rancour.  And pelted he was with right good will.  The genial Mr. Quilp, when he found himself deserted by his obsequious flatterer, Sampson Brass, cried out in the seclusion of his apartment at the wharf:  “Oh, Sampson, Sampson, if I only had you here!” and he was considerably consoled by his operations with a hammer on the desk in front of him.  The feelings of Mr. Quilp were understood, if not respected in Kimberley.

The name of the Prime Minister had not been long added to our “little list” when a local liar led off mildly with intelligence of the Premier’s resignation.  We improved on this by assuming that his resignation was obligatory—­that he had been “dismissed.”  That he had been arrested was the fiction next resorted to; and finally it was blazoned forth that he had been dismissed from the world altogether.  After that he was let rest, and we returned to the misdemeanours of men, in and out of khaki, whose turns had not yet come.  Let me observe in passing that the Prime Minister was—­as we learned subsequently—­more sinned against than sinning.  His apologia, and the extent to which he had been wronged and misrepresented are matters outside the scope of these memoirs.  But they shed a lurid light on the picturesque canards we swallowed—­and digested with an ease that any ostrich would envy.

While engrossed in these denunciations of everything and everybody, Sunday glided by—­glided, for the pendulum was not so slow on Sundays.  We prepared for the worst the Boers could do on the morrow—­rumour said it was to be very bad—­and were in no way disposed to be comforted by the message, on the seriousness of our position, which the Colonel was credited with having despatched to Lord Roberts.  We were unenlivened by the talk we heard on all sides as to the probable effect of the Foreign Consuls’ protests; in optimistic quarters it was felt that the protests would lead to “intervention” of a kind rather different from that bargained for by brother Boer.  The war, it was asserted, might stop “very suddenly.”  Well, of course, it might stop in certain eventualities, or it might not; the sky might fall, but we might easily die (on the diet) before it came down.  The Boers toiling at their trenches outside cherished no illusions on these points.  Their magazines had been blown up, but, the road to Bloemfontein being clear, they could replenish them.  Plumer’s proximity to Mafeking (notified in the afternoon) would have been of more significance in our eyes had not experience prejudiced us against faith in proximity value, Methuen’s proximity to Kimberley, for example, aggravated our sorrows in a very special way.