What a spectacle the town presented!  Business, as I have stated, had been entirely suspended since the Friday; but it was not until Monday that the last vestige of life appeared to have passed away from Kimberley.  Meandering the streets for curiosity or in futile search of corporal sustenance, it was not until then that the hush of the thoroughfares struck one in its full intensity.  The whole machinery of man’s work and operations was at a standstill.  The shops were closed; no car rattled o’er the stony street; no throb of life was anywhere.  A belated cat, a stranger to milk and mice, and with tail still erect as a lamp-post to accentuate the body’s decay, would now and then cross the tile-line.  The houses wore a funereal aspect.  The cabs, enrobed in Red Crosses, awaited an unwelcome fare—­a mangled pedestrian.  Spectral horseman rode hither and thither in pursuit of shells, to aid the victims of their wrath.  A stillness, weird, uncanny, hovered like a pall above the Diamond City.

... now the sounds of population fail, No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale, No busy steps the grass-grown footway tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled.

The plucky manner in which “we” had risked our necks for our readers’ sakes had won golden enconiums for the Diamond Fields’ Advertiser.  Monday’s issue was awaited with unwonted eagerness, interested as we were in the gauntlet flung at Lennox Street.  But the gauntlet had been taken up; there was no paper forthcoming; it was suppressed; the “Military Situation” proscribed its freedom.  This was not altogether unexpected; but a more prudent counsel would have let the Press alone.  Several stories appertaining to Saturday’s outburst were in circulation.  One was that the Editor had been handcuffed and conveyed to gaol—­presumably for seditious libel.  But Mr. Rhodes, it was said, had intervened and offered himself as a “substitute.”  He would take responsibility for the famous article; if anybody was to be punished he would act as criminal.  The story ran, however, that he was let off with a caution—­a sentence at once magnanimous and supremely prudent.

Another night assault had been considered probable, but there was no firing until Tuesday morning when the bombardment was briskly resumed.  Throughout the day the attack was well sustained, despite the strategy of our “snipers.”  Shells crashed in close proximity to vacated houses; half a dozen were broken into; and the Sanatorium, where a strong impenetrable fort had been constructed, was well attended to.  But there was really a better chance of finding Rhodes in the open, for he peregrinated here, there and everywhere, too much of a fatalist, or too fond of fresh air to be intimidated by what was flying in it.  It was rumoured that the heel had been knocked off one of his boots; and fabulous sums were forthwith offered in the souvenir market for the heel.  The story had no foundation in fact—­though not for lack of likely heels; they were as numerous as the pieces of shell that had killed George Labram.  The multiplicity of these fatal fragments was one of the marvels of the Siege.  A single piece had struck Mr. Labram, but the commercial legend pointed to a score!