On June 27 I left Johannesburg under the escort of Major Bobby White, who had kindly promised to see me safely as far as Cape Town.  We travelled in a shabby third-class carriage, the only one on the train, which was merely composed of open trucks.  Our first long delay was at Elandsfontein, practically still in the Rand District.  There the officer in charge came up with the pleasing intelligence that the train we were to join had broken down, and would certainly be four hours late; so we had to get through a very weary wait at this most unattractive little township, whose only interesting features were the distant chimneys and unsightly shafts of the Simmer and Jack and the Rose Deep Mines, and far away, on the horizon, the little white house, amid a grove of trees, which had been Lord Roberts’s headquarters barely a month ago, and from which he had sent the summons to Johannesburg to surrender.  All around, indeed, was the scene of recent fighting, and various polite transport officers tried to while away the tedium of our enforced delay by pointing out various faint ridges, and explaining that there the Gordons had made their splendid charge, or, again, that farther back General French had encountered such a stubborn resistance, and so on, ad libitum.  In response I gazed with enthusiastic interest, but the flat, hideous country, which guards its deeply buried treasure so closely, seemed so alike in every direction, and the operations of the victorious army covered so wide an area, that it was difficult to make a brain picture of that rapid succession of feats of arms.  At the station itself the “Tommys” buzzed about like bees, and the officers were having tea or dinner, or both combined, in the refreshment-room.  One overheard scraps of conversation, from a subaltern to his superior officer:  “A capital bag to-day, sir.  Forty Mausers and ten thousand rounds of ammunition.”  Then someone else remarked that a railway-train from the South passed yesterday, riddled with bullets, and recounted the marvellous escape its occupants had had, which was not encouraging in view of our intended journey over the same route.  A young man in uniform presently entered with a limp, and, in answer to inquiries, said his wounded leg was doing famously, adding that the bullet had taken exactly the same course as the one did not six weeks ago—­only then it had affected the other knee; “so I knew how to treat it, and I am off to the Yeomanry Hospital, if they will have me.  I only left there a fortnight ago, and, by Jove! it was like leaving Paradise!” Another arrival came along saying the Boers had received a proper punishing for their last depredations on the railway, when De Wet had brought off his crowning coup by destroying the mail-bags.  But this gentleman had hardly finished his tale when a decided stir was observable, and we heard a wire was to hand saying the same De Wet was again on the move, and that a strong force of men and guns were to leave for the scene of action