There is little more to record of the actual facts at this moment.  The following cable, which has till now remained unpublished, tells its own tale too sadly:—­

“Steevens, a few days before death, had recovered so far as to be able to attend to some of his journalistic duties, though still confined to bed.  Relapse followed; he died at five in the afternoon.  Funeral same night, leaving Carter’s house (where Steevens was lying during illness) at 11.30.  Interred in Ladysmith Cemetery at midnight.  Night dismal, rain falling, while the moon attempted to pierce the black clouds.  Boer searchlight from Umbala flashed over the funeral party, showing the way in the darkness.  Large attendance of mourners, several officers, garrison, most correspondents.  Chaplain M’Varish officiated.”

When I read that short and simple cablegram, the thought came to my mind that if only the greater number of modern rioters in language were compelled to hoard their words out of sheer necessity for the cable, we should have better results from the attempts at word-painting that now cumber the ground.  And this brings me directly to a consideration of Steevens’s work.  In many respects, of course, it was never, even in separate papers, completed.  Journalist and scholar he was, both.  But the world was allowed to see too much of the journalist, too little of the scholar, in what he accomplished.  ‘The Monologues of the Dead’ was a brilliant beginning.  It proved the splendid work of the past, it presaged more splendid work for the future.  And then, if you please, he became a man of action; and a man of action, if he is to write, must perforce be a journalist.  The preparations had made it impossible that he should ever be anything else but an extraordinary journalist; and accordingly it fell out that the combination of a wonderful equipment of scholarship with a vigorous sense of vitality brought about a unique thing in modern journalism.  Unique, I say:  the thing may be done again, it is true; but he was the pioneer, he was the inventor, of the particular method which he practised.

I began this discussion with a reference to the spare, austere, but quite lucid message of the cablegram announcing the death of Steevens; and I was carried on at once to a deliberate consideration of his literary work, because that work had, despite its vigour, its vividness, its brilliance, just the outline, the spareness, the slimness, the austerity which are so painfully inconspicuous in the customary painter of word-pictures.  Some have said that Steevens was destined to be the Kinglake of the Transvaal.  That is patently indemonstrable.  His war correspondence was not the work of a stately historian.  He could, out of sheer imaginativeness, create for himself the style of the stately historian.  His “New Gibbon”—­a paper which appeared in ’Blackwood’s Magazine’—­is there to prove so much; but that was not the manner in which he usually wrote about war.  He was essentially