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