(!) the transgressors were so outrageously numerous that the heavy undertaking of arraigning half the city was not thought feasible.  Only a few particularly refulgent “criminals” were hauled up and fined.  Where sickness darkened a house the “Law” allowed a candle to light it, the whole night, if necessary, and invalids were accordingly as thick as leaves in Vallombrosa!  An epidemic of all the ills that flesh is heir to raged in the land.  Hypochondriacs moaned with their tongues in their cheeks in the presence of the prying night-patrol.  Fevers flourished; multitudes were prostrated by influenza; the pleura played the devil with innumerable lungs.  Anybody who was not a malingerer was voted a fool, an altruist.  A magistrate, commenting on the great plague and the manner in which the majesty of the “Law” (the majesty of Martial Law!) was being outraged, averred that from his own doorstep every night at eleven o’clock he gazed at hundreds of illuminated houses.  It was true; and we used to wonder which his worship was—­an invalid, an altruist, or an owl!

We held a position at Otto’s Kopje from which our men occasionally made things unpleasant for the Kamfers Dam Laager.  The Boers, naturally, did not like this, and they in turn sometimes harassed the defenders of the kopje.  But Kamfers Dam was shortly to be made quake, for it had just leaked out that a gigantic gun was in course of construction at the De Beers workshops; that men who knew their business were sweating at it day and night.  Opinions were much divided as to the probable utility of this instrument.  Some were disposed to pity the poor Boers when it was ready for action, while others were not less inclined to lament the fate of the poor Briton who would sit behind it, to get blown to pieces by a botched piece of mechanism.  The withering criticisms passed on this prospective product of De Beers were anything but re-assuring.  It was useless to try to impress on the morbid critic that there were skilled Woolwich men engaged in the manufacture of the gun.  The argument would be crushed by that expressive figure, “rats!” The scorn with which these rodents were slung by the tail in the face of anyone who believed in “Long Cecil” (the gun had been so named out of compliment to Mr. Rhodes) was conclusive.  Where was the necessary material to come from?  Oh, De Beers had the material, the optimist would reply.  But optimists, once so ubiquitous, were now as rare as radium.  Our prophets had for their reputations’ sake altered their tactics.  Experience had taught them that the roseate view of things was the least likely to be sound, and they now revelled in predictions of an otto—­not of roses.  They prepared us, with a vengeance, for the worst.  “To-morrow” was ever to be a day of tragic enormity for Kimberley.  The local Armageddon was to begin (daily) at day-break; the enemy’s guns were always being augmented; the town was to be razed to the ground, and, unless surrender was prompt, all its inhabitants with it.  Thus did a spirit of despondency continue to depress the people and the prospect of emancipation grow dimmer and dimmer.