But Colonel Kekewich did not think it a time for sport, and lost no time in ventilating his thoughts on the subject.  Drastic measures were adopted to suppress the fun.  Another proclamation adorned the dead walls—­decreeing that native bars and canteens were to be closed altogether.  To deal effectively with the hooligan school stern methods were necessary, and total prohibition was the initial step—­a step highly lauded by the public in general, and by the white topers of the city in particular.  The coloured bibbers were thus suddenly reduced to water, and some twenty of them—­caught red-handed in crime—­were lashed and sent to prison for two years.  One or two got off with a caution, and with instructions to preach to the locations on the heinousness of hooliganism, and of the power of Martial Law to hang “boys” for less than murder—­as the next roost-robber would learn to his cost.  No remarkable curiosity to be learned in the “Law” was afterwards manifested for some time.

As for the aggrieved liquor people, the Colonel’s proclamation well-nigh broke their backs.  Their feelings must be left to the sympathetic imagination of the reader.  That thirty thousand of her Majesty’s subjects should be “by law forbid” to quench their thirst was incredible.  That men in the “trade” should by consequence suffer financial loss, and have the sweat of their brows, as it were, confiscated, was an evasion of the Constitution (superseded though it was by Martial Law) which outraged the name of liberty.  It was a bitter pill to swallow; but it had to be swallowed under pain of penalty for even a grimace.  Some of the patients could not let the purgative down; they deliberately let nature take its course—­the sequel to which was the mobilisation of the Trapper Reserves for active service.  And still the slimness of the native contrived to dodge the wiles of civilisation.  With the assistance of some Coolie shop-keepers (who acted as middlemen) he yet managed to drink a fair share.  But the middlemen, too, were hauled over the coals.  A few Indians went so far as to establish without license little canteens of their own, thereby outraging all law, civil and military.  In such cases the canteens were confiscated.  The Summary Court had altogether a busy time, and the Official Interpreters, Dutch, Kafir, and Indian, were “sweated” at last.

Wednesday was quiet; so also was Thursday, our peace being marred by neither shells nor hooters.  The hooters, indeed, were never to do it again—­a graceful concession, for which we gave thanks; their cat-calls had been so nerve-shaking.  The monotony was relieved on Friday by some shells which came right into the city—­as far as the Post Office.  They omitted to burst.  The boom of a gun, which had been wont to play havoc with the nervous, had come to be regarded as of no consequence, a mere tap on a drum, eliciting a nonchalant “Ah, there she goes,” and nothing more.  Everybody was alive for fragments of the dead missiles; curio-hunting