For nearly three hours our batteries shelled the Boer kopjes, expending much ammunition with perceptible effect on the brown boulders and presumably on anything animate that might be hidden behind them; we watched many Boers gallop away in haste across the plain, as if unable to stand the leaden hail longer, and one of our batteries advancing boldly got into position, whence it should have enfiladed that of the enemy and wrought havoc among their horses if any were concealed in the adjacent hollows.  What effect the terrific shrapnel fire really produced we had no means of knowing.  Hardly a Boer showed himself while that hurricane of bullets fell, but when General Brocklehurst meditated an assault on the hill his troops were met by a furious rifle fire.  The ninety Imperial Light Horsemen of Colonel Edwardes’s command were obviously too few to dislodge the Boers from the ground they had held so stubbornly.  Further waste of artillery ammunition seemed useless, and the time for employing cavalry to any purpose had not come.  We therefore had the chagrin of watching another force retire without accomplishing its object, and most of us felt from that moment grave doubts whether another such chance of breaking the bonds that envelop us could come again until reinforcements were at hand for the relief of Ladysmith.  As our troops withdrew they were shelled right and left by Boer guns that had been almost silent until then.  Our batteries, aided by Captain Kinnaird-Smith’s two Maxim-Nordenfelts, covered the retirement, but they could not put Surprise Hill out of action, or even attempt a reply to the redoubtable “Long Tom” of Pepworth’s Hill, who on this occasion surpassed himself by throwing three shells in succession on the road by Range Post Gap from a distance that must be well over 9000 yards.  The bit of hilly road where these shells fell and burst is no more than fifty yards long by fifteen wide, and could not have been visible to gunners five or six miles off without the aid of telescopic sights.  Yet the aim was so accurate that one shell fell between two hussar squadrons and another just in rear of a battery, but without hitting man, horse, or gun.  “Long Tom” has done better in long-distance shooting, having thrown one shell nearly to Caesar’s Camp, and the range-finders make that out to be 11,500 yards from Pepworth’s Hill, but these three shots to-day hold the record for range and accuracy combined.

During the following three weeks the already wearisome progress of the siege was broken by no large event.  The Boers, discouraged by their want of success on 9th November, went on from day to day shelling the town with the guns already in position, and mounting others on the hills with which to make the bombardment more effective.  They hoped to do slowly at a safe distance what they had failed to accomplish by a more daring procedure.  The period, notwithstanding, is full of minor incidents, the record of which must be read with