“Long Tom” had come.  “Long Tom,” the hero of Dundee, able to hurl his vast iron cylinder a clean six miles as often as you will.  I saw him and his brother gun on trucks at Sand River Camp on the Transvaal border just before the war began.  They say he is French—­a Creusot gun—­throwing, some say 40lbs., some 95lbs., each shot.  Anyhow, the shell is quite big enough, whatever its weight, and it bangs into shops, chapels, ladies’ bedrooms without any nice distinctions.  I could see “Tom’s” ugly muzzle tilted up above a great earthwork which the Boers had heaped near a tree on the edge of that flat-topped hill, which we may call Pepworth, from a little farm hard by.

Our battery was at once turned on to him, and though short at first, it got the range, and poured the deadly shrapnel over that hill for hour after hour.  But other guns were there—­perhaps as many as six—­and they replied to our battery, whilst “Tom” reserved his attention for the town.  Often we thought him silenced, but always he began again, just when we were forgetting him, sometimes after over an hour’s pause.  The Boer gunners, whoever they may be, are not wanting in courage.  So the artillery battle went on, hour after hour.  I sat on the rocks and watched.  At my side the Gordons on picket duty were playing with two little white kids.  On the plain in front no one was to be seen but one lone and dirty soldier, who was steadily marching in across it, no one knew from where.  He must have lost his way in the night, and now was making for the nearest British lines, hanging his rifle unconcernedly over his shoulder, butt behind.

So we watched and waited.  At one moment Dr. Jameson came up to get a look at his old enemy.  Then we heard heavy rifle fire far away on our left, where the Gloucesters and Royal Irish Fusiliers had been sent out the night before, and were now on the verge of that terrible disaster which has kept us all anxious and uncertain to-day.  The rumour goes that both battalions have disappeared, and what survives of them will next be found in Pretoria.  At eight o’clock I saw a new force of Boers coming down a gully in a great mountain behind Pepworth Hill.  But for my glass, I should have taken them for a black stream marked with white rocks.  But they were horses and men, and the white rocks were horses too.  Heavy firing began far away on our right.  At nine the Manchesters were called off to reinforce.  At half-past nine the Gordons followed, and I went with them.  About a mile and a half from the centre we were halted again on the top of another rocky kopje covered with low bush and trees, out of which we frightened several little brown deer and some strange birds.