And, indeed, these habits are strangely various even as presented to the eyes of a contemporary student.  Some people, having spent much time and patient labour in making burrows for themselves, find life there so intolerably monotonous that they prefer to take the chances above ground.  Others pass whole days with wives and families or in solitary misery where there is not light enough to read or work, scarcely showing a head outside from sunrise to sunset.  They may be seen trooping away from fragile tin-roofed houses half an hour before daybreak carrying children in their arms, or a cat, or monkey, or a mongoose, or a cage of pet birds, and they come back similarly laden when the night gets too dim for gunners to go on shooting.  There would be a touch of humour in all this if it were not so deeply pathetic in its close association with possible tragedies.  One never knows where or at what hour a stray shot or splinter will fall, and it is pitiful sometimes to hear cries for dolly from a prattling mite who may herself be fatherless or motherless to-morrow.  We think as little as possible of such things, putting them from us with the light comment that they happen daily elsewhere than in besieged towns, and making the best we can of a melancholy situation.

There are, I believe, many good reasons why Sir George White should allow his army to be hemmed in here defending a practically deserted town, apart from the ignominy that abandonment would entail, and it is probably sound strategy to keep Boer forces here as long as possible while preparations are being matured for attacking them from other directions.  On the latter point one cannot express an opinion without full knowledge of the circumstances such as we cannot hope to get while communications are cut off.  But nobody can pretend to regard our present inaction following investment as anything but a disagreeable necessity, or affect a cheerful endurance of conditions that become more intolerable day after day.  Now and then we have hopes that the Boers may risk everything in a general attack with the object of carrying this place by storm, when they would most certainly be beaten off and lose heavily.

They did something to encourage this hope yesterday.  It began with a heavy artillery duel between “Long Tom” and the naval gun that is known as “Lady Anne.”  After vain attempts to silence our battery, the enemy’s fire, generally so accurate, became wild, several shells going so high that they struck the convent hospital hundreds of yards in rear.  This, at any rate, is the most charitable explanation of acts that would otherwise be inexcusable.  The Red Cross was at that time, and for days before, flying above the convent, in which Colonel Dick-Cunyngham and Major Riddell were patients, under the care of nursing sisters.  Fortunately, good shelter was found for them in the convent cellars until they could be removed to safer quarters, but before this much of the upper rooms had been reduced to ruins by persistent