when the signal to fire was given they dropped behind cover with such speed
and certainty that seldom a man was hit. Then, when the leaden hail had
ceased to fall upon the rocks, they sprang out again, and gave our fellows
lead for lead. After a while our gunners seemed to locate them, and the
shells came through the air, snarling savagely, as leopards snarl before
they spring, and the flying shrapnel reached many of the Boers, wounding,
maiming, or killing them; yet they held their position with indomitable
pluck, those who were not hit leaping out, regardless of personal danger,
to pick up those who were wounded. They were a strange, motley-looking
crowd, dressed in all kinds of common farming apparel, just such a crowd as
one is apt to see in a far inland shearing shed in Australia, but no man
with a man's heart in his body could help admiring their devotion to one
another or their loyalty to the cause they were risking their lives for.

One sight I saw which will stay with me whilst memory lasts. They had
placed me under a waggon under a mass of overhanging rock for safety, and
there they brought two wounded men. One was a man of fifty, a hard old
veteran, with a complexion as dark as a New Zealand Maori; the beard that
framed the rugged face was three-fourths grey, his hands were as rough and
knotted by open air toil as the hoofs of a working steer.

He looked what he was--a Boer of mixed Dutch and French lineage. Later on I
got into conversation with him, and he told me a good deal of his life. His
father was descended from one of the old Dutch families who had emigrated
to South Africa in search of religious liberty in the old days, when the
country was a wilderness. His mother had come in an unbroken line from one
of the noble families of France who fled from home in the days of the
terrible persecution of the Huguenots. He himself had been many
things--hunter, trader, farmer, fighting man. He had fought against the
natives, and he had fought against our people. The younger man was his son,