after many people have been crowded together for some time is less
pleasant to contemplate, but even for that the resourceful Imperial
Light Horse are prepared, and they already begin to talk of air-shafts
so cunningly contrived that light and air may enter, but shells be
rigidly excluded. Civilians in their turn emulate the Light Horse, but
with unequal success, and their excavations assume such primitive
forms that future archæologists may be puzzled to invent satisfactory
explanations of curious differences in the habits of the cave-dwellers
of Ladysmith, as exemplified by the divergent types of their underground
abodes.

And, indeed, these habits are strangely various even as presented to the
eyes of a contemporary student. Some people, having spent much time and
patient labour in making burrows for themselves, find life there so
intolerably monotonous that they prefer to take the chances above
ground. Others pass whole days with wives and families or in solitary
misery where there is not light enough to read or work, scarcely showing
a head outside from sunrise to sunset. They may be seen trooping away
from fragile tin-roofed houses half an hour before daybreak carrying
children in their arms, or a cat, or monkey, or a mongoose, or a cage of
pet birds, and they come back similarly laden when the night gets too
dim for gunners to go on shooting. There would be a touch of humour in
all this if it were not so deeply pathetic in its close association with
possible tragedies. One never knows where or at what hour a stray shot
or splinter will fall, and it is pitiful sometimes to hear cries for
dolly from a prattling mite who may herself be fatherless or motherless
to-morrow. We think as little as possible of such things, putting them
from us with the light comment that they happen daily elsewhere than in
besieged towns, and making the best we can of a melancholy situation.