If things were going well, “Why, in the name of success,” asks Mr. Pearse in his notes for 9th February, “should our universal provider, Colonel Ward, take this occasion to reduce rations?  We are now down to 1 lb. of meat, including horse, four ounces of mealie meal, four ounces of bread, with a sausage ration daily ‘as far as possible.’  Sausages may be mysteries elsewhere, but we know them here to be horse-flesh, highly spiced, and nothing more.  Bread is a brown, ‘clitty’ mixture of mealie meal, starch, and the unknown.  Vegetables we have none, except a so-called wild spinach that overgrew every neglected garden, and could be had for the taking until people discovered how precious it was.  Tea is doled out at the rate of one-sixth of an ounce to each adult daily, or in lieu thereof, coffee mixed with mealie meal.”

February 10 was the day which had been looked forward to as the one on which relief would arrive.  It did not come, and though the messages flashed over the hills from the beleaguered town at the time were full of an heroic cheerfulness, the disappointment was hard to bear.  For with rations reduced, with disease harvesting for death where fire and steel had failed, the defenders were now face to face with the grimmer realities of war.  Yet hope was never absent, and never at any time did the stern determination to bid the enemy defiance to the last flicker or grow fainter.  Mr. Pearse’s diary for this period gives many details of the highest interest of the position in the town, and suggests the sufferings, while it does justice to the splendid spirit of the garrison:—­

February 10.—­Heliograph signals have been twinkling spasmodically, but their language is written in a sealed book.  We only know that these “helios” come not from kopjes this side of Tugela, nor from the former signal-station south of Potgieter’s and Skiet’s Drifts, as they did a few days ago, but from hills near Weenen, as in the months before Buller crossed the Tugela, thus indicating a retrograde movement.  It may be a hopeful sign of communication with some flanking column away eastward, and therefore kept secret, but we have our doubts.  Depression sets in again, and, as always happens when there is bad news or dread of it, the death-rate at Intombi Hospital camp has gone up to fifteen in a single day.  Since the date of investment four hundred and eighty patients have died there from all causes.  It does not seem a large proportion out of the eighteen thousand under treatment from time to time, but it is very high in view of the fact that we have only had thirty-six soldiers and civilians in all killed by the thousands of shells that have been hurled at us in fifteen weeks.

The market’s sensitive pulse also shows that there is a suspicion of something wrong.  Black tobacco in small quantities may still be had by those who care to pay forty-five shillings for a half-pound cake of it, as one Sybarite did to-day.  A box of fifty inferior cigars sold for L6:10s., a packet of ten Virginia cigarettes for twenty-five shillings, and eggs at forty-eight shillings a dozen.  Soldiers who cannot hope to supplement their meagre rations by private purchases at this rate stroll about the streets languid, hungry, silent.  There is no laughter among them.