Betty says they were an interesting-looking body of men; strong-framed, heavy-featured, with long unkempt hair and beards.  They rode shaggy, moth-eaten-looking little ponies, each man with a bundle of hay bound to his saddle and a sausage in his wallet.  Fathers among them as hale as the brawny sons by their sides.  They looked capable of any amount of fatigue.

Numbers of stray dogs and cats attest the many deserted homes.

JANUARY 15.—­Every train brings women and children, hobby-horses and canary birds back to their homes in Johannesburg.  Betty has returned, accompanied by Mr. Seymour Port, from Pretoria.  She gives a very spirited account of her visit.  Through Mr. Sauer, one of the advocates retained by the Reformers, a visiting permit was obtained.  She and Mr. Fort were obliged to wait several hours, in company with a crowd of wives, at the prison gates, under a broiling sun.  All were loaded down with offerings.

Betty’s own donation was several green-lined umbrellas (a god-send in a whitewashed court beat upon by a tropical sun).  After being admitted each lady was taken into a private room and ’felt all over by a Boer woman,’ who was so fat, Betty declares, ’she must have grown up in the room, as she could not possibly have got through the door, even sideways.’

In the prison court the prisoners were sitting about in great diversity of costume, pyjamas predominating.  The weather was suffocatingly hot.  To while away the tedious time some were playing marbles, others reading, and a few of the most active brains on the Rand were caught dozing at midday, in a strip of shadow the width of one’s hand, the sole shade in the whole enclosure.  Colonel Bettington sat on a bench near the entrance in a peculiar and striking costume which proved to be, to those who had courage to linger and analyse, pyjama drawers rolled to the knees, a crash towel draped with happy blending of coolness and perfect propriety around body, noble Bedouin arrangement of wet crash towel on head, single eyeglass in eye, merry smile.  Mr. Lace was the only one of the company who could suddenly have been set down in Piccadilly without confusion to himself and beholders.  He wore a neat brown suit, pale pink shirt, and a stylish straw sailor hat.  The prisoners showed a touching interest, Betty says, in the distribution of their gifts.  One husband asked his wife almost before she was within arm’s length what she had brought him.  She had brought him a box of Pasta Mack tabloids, and unfortunately there was not at that time a bath in the whole prison.  Another gentleman was presented with a Cologne spray.  He was the envy of the jail; within twenty-four hours every Cologne spray in Pretoria was bought up and in the possession of the Reform Committee.