days as a sample of work.  We start at 6 A.M. on Sunday; do a full day’s riding and scouting, and get three hours’ sleep that night at Enslin.  Then we saddle up and pass the rest of the night and all the next day riding, except when we are climbing hills on foot to look out.  The second night we sit among the hills expecting an attack, and next day till one o’clock are in the saddle again. A la guerre comme a la guerre.  Three days and two nights’ hard work on three hours’ sleep.  And all this time you are drinking champagne (well, most of it, anyway), and sleeping in soft beds with delicious white sheets, and smoking Egyptian cigarettes, and wearing clean clothes, with nice stiff collars and shirt cuffs, and having a bath in the morning, warm, with sweet-smelling soap (Oh, my God!), and sitting side by side at table, first a man and then a woman; the same old arrangement, I suppose, knives to the right and forks to the left as usual.  Ho! ho!  There are times I could laugh.  No doubt we shall all get redigested as soon as we get back, but meantime, as a set-off to the hardship, one knows what it is to feel free.  We eat what we can pick up, and we lie down to sleep on the bare ground.  We wash seldom, and our clothes wear to pieces on our bodies.  We find we can do without many things, and though we sometimes miss them, there comes a keen sense of pleasure from being entire master of oneself and all one’s possessions.  Your water-bottle hangs on your shoulder; your haversack, with your blanket, is strapped to your saddle; rifle, bandolier, and a pair of good glasses are your only other possessions.  As you stand at your pony’s side ready to mount, you may be starting for the day or you may be away a fortnight, but your preparations are the same.

Above all others does this scouting life develop your faculties, sharpen your senses of hearing and of seeing, and, in practical ways, of thinking too; of noting signs and little portents and drawing conclusions from them; of observing things.  You feel more alive than you ever felt before.  Every day you are more or less dependent on your own faculties.  Not only for food and drink for yourself and your pony, but for your life itself.  And your faculties respond to the call.  Your glance, as it scans the rocks and the plain, is more wary and more vigilant; your ears, as you lie in the scrub, prick themselves at a sound like a Red Indian’s, and the least movement among cattle or game or Kaffirs, or the least sign that occurs within range of your glasses, is noticed and questioned in an instant.

This you get in return for all you give up—­in return for the sweet-smelling soap and the footman who calls you in the morning.  Oh, that pale-faced footman!  It is dawn when, relieved on look-out, I clamber down the rocks to our bivouac.  A few small fires burn, and my pal points to a tin coffee cup and baked biscuit by one of them.  It is the hour at home for the pale-faced footman.  I see