Business was at this period conducted in more orderly fashion at the Washington Market, partly due, no doubt, to the unmixed “meat” put up for sale.  Everything was simplified; the Authorities had developed into wholehoggers in horseflesh.  A placard bearing the grim inscription, “horse only” was flaunted in the market place.  The arrangement saved the butcher much troublesome computation—­untrammelled as he was by bovine fractions—­and injured trade agreeably.  It kept off the folk who had no dogs, and others who preferred to take the State Soup, with their eyes shut.  All the cattle slaughtered were exclusively for the Kitchen.  The “Law” decreed it; it was in the “Gazette,” and was nothing if not in equity.  The quality of the soup was poorer than ever; the quantity offered for sale was suspiciously large, and, oh! so inferior to the article served out with a flourish of ladles a week before.  Many took the pledge against it (some of them broke it), but there were plenty less aesthetically constituted who could dissipate on two pints!  We could yet buy carrots, dry, tough little things; but they were vegetables beyond question, and there is much in a name where horses are cooked.  They (the carrots) were sold by the State at threepence a bunch, and the people still made wild rushes to purchase them.  A force of police was always on duty at the vegetable, the carrot wing of the market, and it was interesting to watch the human nature in everybody, including strong men not ordinarily credited with much of it.

Thursday was uneventful.  The quasi-official statement relative to the relief of Mafeking was contradicted.  The peculiarity of the proceeding—­of contradicting an agreeable canard—­not the contradiction itself—­occasioned surprise; it was so unusual.  Some people attributed it to a desire on the Colonel’s part cheaply to vindicate Official veracity in all things—­not injurious to the “Military Situation!” All our little troubles and kicks against the pricks had to be subordinated to the “Military Situation.”  The quality of the very horse we ate was due to the “Military Situation.”  The local situation, with its alarming death roll, was a trifle light as air beside the other.  Had the Colonel in his wisdom seen anything in its suppression advantageous to the “Military Situation,” the truth anent Mafeking would hardly have seen the light.  The “Military Situation” was sacrosanct, supreme, inviolable!  It was a fetish, a sort of idol that the “Law” commanded all creeds and classes to worship.

In the afternoon an occasional shell was jerked into the town.  Kenilworth was loudly barked at for an hour; and the correspondent of the London Times, while driving in the suburb, narrowly escaped being bitten.  But no cattle were hit; that was the pity of it.  We could have forgiven the Boers much had they only killed the oxen, and provided us with something rational to eat, in spite of the Colonel and his horses.