Three and three make six weeks.  We were not yet free—­not quite.  Our period was doubled.  The wary seers who “told us so” had triumphed; and they exploited their intuition for what it was worth, or rather for a great deal more, since clearly it was not worth much.  They had triumphed (by a short head, so to speak), or said they had.  What matter.  They were minor prophets; and the nearness of Methuen and his Column enabled us to bear the trumpet-blowing with equanimity and good humour.  The monster head-lines of the Advertiser—­delightful paper!—­proclaimed it “the last week of the siege!” It was placarded on the walls.  The newsboys shrieked it abroad.  The man in the street confirmed it.  The populace believed it.  The grocer beamed, and the haberdasher made bold definitely to state the date on which a particular reel of cotton could be purchased.  It even stimulated the hotel-keepers to discover hidden spirits.  The last week of the siege! how comforting it sounded; and what potent influence it possessed to soothe temperaments unadaptable to siege life.

The funerals of the brave men who had fought their last fight on Saturday took place in the afternoon.  A funeral is a mournful thing always; but here were six young men, cut down in the heyday of their lives, being conveyed to their last resting-place.  Most of them had been esteemed citizens of the town in defence of which they died.  It was this, the circumstances under which they fell, the feeling that it was for the preservation of the homes of the people they had given up their lives, that evoked so much sympathy and sorrow.  Thousands of mourners attended to pay the fast tribute of respect to the dead.  The various sections of the Town Guard in processional order followed the coffins to the cemetery.

Many things occurred in the course of the day to enhance our satisfaction with the prospect of emancipation.  At eleven o’clock an alarm was sounded, and the services in the churches were in consequence cut short.  The half of the Town Guard enjoying their day off had their relaxation cut short, too—­unnecessarily, as it turned out.  Fifty or sixty Boers were prowling about, a powerful glass enabled the zealous look-out to explain.  It was a mere storm in a teacup, not by any means the first that had raged in that fragile utensil.  This capped all past tempests, and made the men who had been off duty exceedingly angry, and the men who were on, exceedingly gay.  Mafeking, however, was fighting on still; and many Boers had been killed in Natal.  The piece-de-resistance was the last to come.  It concerned our own Relief Column, whose progress the enemy had had the temerity to impede at Belmont.  How their hardihood had been rewarded with “cold steel”; how they had quailed before it; how they had fled before the conquering Methuen:  these and other details, in all their charming vagueness, were received with rapture.  It was fine news; and wounded men in the hospital, about to die, changed their minds and lived when they heard it.