"When we struck Pretoria I had a hell-and-a-half of a time trying to
interest the Dutch vote in my gun an' her potentialities. The bottom was
out of things rather much just about that time. Kruger was praying some
and stealing some, and the Hollander lot was singing, 'If you haven't any
money you needn't come round,' Nobody was spending his dough on anything
except tickets to Europe. We were both grossly neglected. When I think how
I used to give performances in the public streets with dummy cartridges,
filling the hopper and turning the handle till the sweat dropped off me, I
blush, Sir. I've made her to do her stunts before Kaffirs--naked sons of
Ham--in Commissioner Street, trying to get a holt somewhere.

"Did I talk? I despise exaggeration--'tain't American or scientific--but
as true as I'm sitting here like a blue-ended baboon in a kloof, Teddy
Roosevelt's Western tour was a maiden's sigh compared to my advertising
work.

"'Long in the spring I was rescued by a commandant called Van Zyl--a big,
fleshy man with a lame leg. Take away his hair and his gun and he'd make a
first-class Schenectady bar-keep. He found me and the Zigler on the veldt
(Pretoria wasn't wholesome at that time), and he annexed me in a
somnambulistic sort o' way. He was dead against the war from the start,
but, being a Dutchman, he fought a sight better than the rest of that 'God
and the Mauser' outfit. Adrian Van Zyl. Slept a heap in the daytime--and
didn't love niggers. I liked him. I was the only foreigner in his
commando. The rest was Georgia Crackers and Pennsylvania Dutch--with a
dash o' Philadelphia lawyer. I could tell you things about them would
surprise you. Religion for one thing; women for another; but I don't know
as their notions o' geography weren't the craziest. 'Guess that must be
some sort of automatic compensation. There wasn't one blamed ant-hill in
their district they didn't know _and_ use; but the world was flat, they