The quickness of our advance, too, was of the utmost importance.  From the moment we started, the enemy was given no opportunity to pull himself together and look about him.  Hunter, Paget, Clements, and Rundle dashed into the Fouriesberg Valley exactly together.  Directly we had got through, Hunter detached the main part of his column, the Highland Brigade, under Macdonald, and sent it with several guns as hard as it could pelt to back up Bruce-Hamilton, knowing, now that we had carried our end of the valley, that the pressure would come at the east end.  Meantime, while Macdonald marched, we waited.  We even retreated two or three miles, and for twenty-four hours lay on the pass and slept.  Then we got up and began sauntering up the big irregular valley along the Basutoland border towards Naawpoort Nek.

It was a moment of infinite expectation.  Bets were laid on the amount of our bag.  The general impression was that we should get some of them, but that the main body would, somehow or other, escape.  We had so often toiled and taken nothing, that this sudden miraculous draught quite flabbergasted us.  And what must have been the feelings of the poor Boers?  They tried Naawpoort Nek:  no exit.  They knocked at the Golden Gate:  it was locked.  Then back they turned and met Hunter sauntering up the valley, and we gave them the time of day with our cow-guns, and told them how glad we were to see them.  “Fancy meeting you, of all people in the world!” And so they chucked it.  It was a complete checkmate.

The surrender occupied the next three days; our total bag 4100, I am told.  I wish you could have been there.  It was a memorable sight among those uninhabited and lonely mountains.  The heights of Basutoland, ridge behind ridge, to right of us; the tops snow streaked; groups of excited Basutos riding about in the plains, watching our movements; to left the great mountain chain we had fought our way through; and in the midst spread over the wide saddle-backed hill, that slopes away north-eastward, and breaks up in a throng of sharp peaks and a jumble of inaccessible-looking hills in the direction of the Golden Gate, is drawn up the dirty, ragged, healthy, sun-scorched British army with greasy rifles in its blackened hands, watching imperturbably and without much interest, the parties of Boers, and waggons, and droves of cattle as they come meandering in.  Each Boer, as he rides up, hands over his rifle, or more often flings it angrily on the ground, and the armourers set to work, smashing them all across an anvil.  Rather a waste of good weapons it seemed, I must say.  Many of the Boers were quite boys, about fourteen or fifteen.  They are much better looking than you would think from the men.  The men are big and well built, but they look, for the most part, stupid and loutish, and when this is not so, their expression is more often cunning than intelligent.  The amount of hair about their face, too, and their indifference to washing, does