Much the same thing happened later in the day to the smoking-room of the Royal Hotel.  It also was inhabited the minute before, would have been inhabited the minute after, but just then was quite empty.  We had a cheerful lunch, as there were guns returning from a reconnaissance, and they have adopted a thoughtless habit of coming home past our house.  Briefly, from six till two you would have said that the earth was being shivered to matchwood and fine powder.  But, alas! man accustoms himself so quickly to all things, that a bombardment to us, unless stones actually tinkle on the roof, is now as an egg without salt.

The said reconnaissance I did not attend, knowing exactly what it would be.  I mounted a hill, to get warm and to make sure, and it was exactly what I knew it would be.  Our guns fired at the Boer guns till they were silent; and then the Boer dismounted men fired at our dismounted men; then we came home.  We had one wounded, but they say they discovered the Boer strength on Bluebank, outside Range Post, to be 500 or 600.  I doubt if it is as much; but, in any case, I think two men and a boy could have found out all that three batteries and three regiments did.  With a little dash, they could have taken the Boer guns on Bluebank; but of dash there was not even a little.

Nov. 15.—­I wake at 12.25 this morning, apparently dreaming of shell-fire.

“Fool,” says I to myself, and turn over, when—­swish-h! pop-p!—­by the piper, it is shell-fire!  Thud—­thud—­thud—­ten or a dozen, I should say, counting the ones that woke me.  What in the name of gunpowder is it all about?  But there is no rifle-fire that I can hear, and there are no more shells now:  I sleep again.

In the morning they asked the Director of Military Intelligence what the shelling was; he replied, “What shelling?” Nobody knew what it was, and nobody knows yet.  They had a pretty fable that the Boers, in a false alarm, fired on each other:  if they did, it was very lucky for them that the shells all hit Ladysmith.  My own notion is that they only did it to annoy—­in which they failed.  They were reported in the morning, as usual, searching for bodies with white flags; but I think that is their way of reconnoitring.  Exhausted with this effort, the Boers—­heigho!—­did nothing all day.  Level downpour all the afternoon, and Ladysmith a lake of mud.

Nov. 16.—­Five civilians and two natives hit by a shrapnel at the railway station; a railway guard and a native died.  Languid shelling during morning.

Nov. 17.—­During morning, languid shelling.  Afternoon, raining—­Ladysmith wallowing deeper than ever.

And that—­heigh-h-ho!—­makes a week of it.  Relieve us, in Heaven’s name, good countrymen, or we die of dulness!

XIV.

NEARING THE END.

     DULNESS INTERMINABLE—­LADYSMITH IN 2099 A.D.—­SIEGES OBSOLETE
     HARDSHIPS—­DEAD TO THE WORLD—­THE APPALLING FEATURES OF A
     BOMBARDMENT.