being wrecked by the Boers tearing up the rails.  Under these circumstances I was allotted comparatively safe quarters at the house of Mr. Benjamin Weil, of the firm of the well-known South African merchants.  His residence stood in the centre of the little town, adjacent to the railway-station.  At that time bomb-proof underground shelters, with which Mafeking afterwards abounded, had not been thought of, or time had not sufficed for their construction.  On all sides one heard reproaches levelled at the Cape Government, and especially at General Sir William Butler, until lately commanding the troops in Cape Colony, for having so long withheld the modest reinforcements which had been persistently asked for, and, above all, the very necessary artillery.

At that date the Mafeking garrison consisted of about seven or eight hundred trained troops.  The artillery, under Major Panzera, comprised four old muzzle-loading seven-pounder guns with a short range, a one-pound Hotchkiss, one Nordenfeldt, and about seven ^{.}303 Maxims—­in fact, no large modern pieces whatever.  The town guard, hastily enrolled, amounted to 441 defenders, among whom nationalities were curiously mixed, as the following table shows: 

British 378
Germans 4
Americans 4
Russians 6
Dutch 27
Norwegians 5
Swedes 2
Arabs and Indians 15

          
                          ____

Total 441[23]

This force did not appear sufficiently strong to resist the three or four thousand Boers, with field-guns, who were advancing to its attack under one of their best Generals—­namely Cronje—­but everyone remained wonderfully calm, and the townspeople rose to the occasion in a most creditable manner.

Very late that same evening, just as I was going to bed, I received a message from Colonel Baden-Powell, through one of his Staff, to say he had just been informed, on trustworthy authority, that no less than 8,000 burghers composed the force likely to arrive on the morrow, that it was probable they would rush the town, and that the garrison would be obliged to fight its way out.  He concluded by begging me to leave at once by road for the nearest point of safety.  Naturally I had to obey.  I shall never forget that night:  it was cold and gusty after a hot day, with frequent clouds obscuring the moon, as we walked round to Major Gould Adams’s house to secure a Cape cart and some Government mules, in order that I might depart at dawn.  At first I was ordered to Kanya, a mission-station some seventy miles away, an oasis in the Kalahari Desert.  This plan gave rise to a paragraph which I afterwards saw in some of the daily papers, that I had left Mafeking under the escort of a missionary, and some cheery spirit made a sketch of my supposed departure as reproduced here.  Later on, however, it was thought provisions