himself, which was rather lucky for him (or unlucky for the horse).  A few days before that we were camped on the river and had a picket on the other side.  Two or three Boers crept up the river right between our picket and the main body, and then walked straight to the picket as if coming from us and fired into it at point-blank range.  They mortally wounded one of our men and in the dusk escaped.  They are as cunning as Indians.  Sometimes, as in these cases, they show great coolness and daring, while at others they are easily dispersed; but they are generally pretty keen, and you have to be very much on the alert in dealing with them.

You at home will probably be annoyed to find the war dragging on so.  About election time the papers were announcing that it was over.  It had been a hard job, they said, but it was finished at last.  A good deal was occurring out here which did not quite tally with that theory, but those things were ignored or very slightly referred to, so that we on the spot wondered to see the war drop out of sight, and were puzzled to read in the Times that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line blown up in ten different places.  The continuance of the war must strike you as a renewal, but there was never a lull really.

People who think the war can be ended by farm-burning, &c., mistake the Boer temper.  I scarcely know how to convey to you any idea of the spirit of determination that exists among them all, women and even children as well as men.  The other day I picked up at a farmhouse a short characteristic form of prayer, written out evidently by the wife in a child’s copybook, ending thus:  “Forgive me all my sins for the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, in whom I put all my trust for days of sorrow and pain.  And bring back my dear husband and child and brothers, and give us our land back again, which we paid for with blood from the beginning.”  Simple enough as you see, and no particular cant about it, but very much in earnest.  At another farm a small girl interrupted her preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at us on an old piano.  We were carting the people off.  It was raining hard and blowing—­a miserable, hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing along her children to the ox-waggon outside, and this poor little wretch in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final defiance.  One smiled, but it was rather dramatic all the same, and exactly like a picture.  These are straws, but one could multiply them with incidents from every farm we go to.  Their talk is invariably, and without so far a single exception, to the same effect—­“We will never give in, and God sooner or later will see us through.”