As our lumbering cab drove up Adderley Street to the hotel a squadron of
the newly raised South African Light Horse rode past. The men looked
very jaunty and well set up with their neat uniforms, bandoliers and
"smasher" hats with black cocks' feathers. There has never been the
slightest difficulty in raising these irregular bodies of mounted
infantry. The doors of their office in Atkinson's Buildings were
besieged by a crowd of applicants--very many of them young men who had
arrived from England for the purpose of joining. A certain amount of
perfectly good-humoured banter was levelled against these brand-new
soldiers by their friends, and some fun poked at them about their
riding. Occasionally, for instance, a few troopers were unhorsed during
parade and the riderless steeds trotted along the public road at
Rosebank. But certainly the tests of horsemanship were severe. Many of
the horses supplied by Government were very wild and sometimes behaved
like professional buckjumpers; and it is no easy task to control the
eccentric and unexpected gyrations of such a beast when the rider is
encumbered with the management of a heavy Lee-Metford rifle. Since the
day on which I first saw the squadron in question it has passed through
its baptism of fire at Colenso. The Light Horse advanced on the right of
Colonel Long's ill-fated batteries, and was cruelly cut up by a
murderous fire from Hlangwane Hill.

Capetown is not well furnished with places of amusement. There is, it is
true, a roomy theatre, whose manager, Mr. de Jong, sent an invitation
to the staff of the "Pink 'Un" to dine with him and his friends at
Pretoria on New Year's Day! How the Boers must have laughed when they
read of this cordial invitation! During the few days which elapsed
before our ambulance train started for the front we paid a visit to the
theatre, but we found the stage tenanted by a "Lilliputian Company," and