Peace was granted to Secocoeni, and the quietness and gloom of the country became even more profound.

Now, had a commission, royal or joint, been opened in Pretoria to inquire into the truth of the allegations made against the Government, history might perhaps be able to record that judgment, followed by justice, had overtaken the Transvaal.  No commission was opened.  There was a banquet and a ball.  The suspense increased in intensity.  Understrappers, and agents of the discontented faction, filled the country with rumours of impending annexation, and sometimes of impending conquest.  The Boers, the inhabitants of the country, asked day after day what was the mission of the English Commissioner.  They visited him in hundreds; but he knew the wonderful advantage to be gathered from the heightening of the mystery, and the intensifying of the excitement.  He listened to everyone; but he maintained a gloomy and impassive silence, neither checking the aspirations of the annexationists, nor dissipating the forebodings of the farmers.

News arrived that troops were marching towards, and massing on, Theophilus sought not to alleviate the anxieties of the Government, nor to quell the now rising alarm amongst the people; he simply sat still and listened, watching the writhings and stragglings of the doomed Volksraad, and awaiting a favourable moment to end its existence.

At length someone determined to ask:  ’Was it not possible to avert this annexation which loomed before every mind, brooding like a shadow upon the country?’ He went to Sir Theophilus; he asked his question; and at length the oracle spoke.  Without moving a muscle of his wonderfully impassive countenance, without even raising his eyes to look at the interlocutor, Sir Theophilus calmly murmured:  ’It is too late!—­too late!’ And so, without the authorization of the home Government, without the consent of her Majesty’s High Commissioner, without the concurrence of the Volksraad, against the will of thirty-nine-fortieths of the people, and in defiance of the protest of their Executive, as Mr. Anthony Trollope puts it, Sir Theophilus said:  ’Then and from thenceforth the Transvaal shall be British property!’ So he put up the Queen’s flag.

Now, it is impossible to conceive anything more admirable for its discretion, more wisely calculated as to the moment of its occurrence, or more suavely and yet firmly done than this act.  There was not a blow struck, not a shot fired; and the first impulse of nearly every person in the country, whether in principle opposed to annexation or not, was to congratulate Sir Theophilus Shepstone on the skill, tact, and good fortune with which he had put an end to the excessive anxiety, the mental strain, the fears, hopes, and expectations by which the whole country was paralyzed.  Whether the annexation be now held to be right or wrong, its execution, so far as regards the act itself, was an unparalleled triumph of tact, modesty, and firmness.