having approached to within insinuating range and having conquered a momentary nervousness, he cleared his throat, and then he lifted up his voice and said—

"Er-I was going to ask you-er-if you could let us have just a little-er-bread."

"Vootsak, you- -!" was the maiden's rejoinder, uttered with a marked asperity of manner and accompanied by a fierce stamp of her shapely foot.

The Curate had been well brought up. He was not one of those who can be depended upon to shine when bandying badinage with a barmaid. He was shocked and disappointed, and he rode away with a heart too full for words; nor did he feel it incumbent upon him to tell the story against himself when he sought the Column on returning from his fruitless quest. But his two orderlies were of a different mind. They came back grinning from ear to ear and trammelled by no scruples, and they gave away their officer in a fashion most unbecoming in troopers singled out for intimate service from a regiment of old renown, a regiment which had fought with rare distinction under Marlborough at Blenheim and which had been present at the holocaust of Malplaquet.

But if the rebuff experienced at the hands of the damsel of the stoep came upon the Curate as a most unpleasant shock, he received a still more unpleasant

shock ere many weeks had passed. The Column was to meet with a serious and an unexpected check. Travelling light, its impedimenta left in rear under care of a Militia Company which it then carried about with it in waggons, the commando fell in with a few scattered adversaries one afternoon, hunted them with zest into a broken, hilly tract, and halted in the evening in anticipation of an advance at dawn. But during the night-watches the Intelligence-Merchant discovered that the enemy, swollen by converging reinforcements, was concentrating in strong force and preparing to contrive an ambuscade. Thereupon the Column-Commander, allowing no hint of his design to get abroad, decided to execute a volte-face. He, moreover, only issued his orders to that effect at the last possible moment, hoping by this means to deceive his opponents and to escape from awkward ground before the hostile commanders could conform and strike their blow. The Squadron-Leader was away on leave at this time, but his Second-in-Command was happily an experienced soldier; this placed the Curate at the head of a troop. On this particular morning the Lancers were to be in front, the Curate's troop was to have led the advance, and it was consequently responsible for providing the foremost picquets : under the changed conditions this troop found itself suddenly

transformed into the hindmost échelon of the rear-guard.

The dust created by the few carts accompanying the Column when they moved off gave warning to the enemy of what was contemplated, and they acted instantly. With that startling rapidity which signalised their combinations under practised leaders, they closed upon the rear-guard and, as it were, gripped it by the tail. The fate of the Curate's troop remained in suspense as the Column, furiously beset and constantly outflanked, maintained a steady running fight as best it could against swarms of impetuous horsemen, excited by a preliminary success and eager to convert this into a decisive victory. The Lancers were, however, veteran soldiers, knowing every move in this rough game of mobile warfare, and they were in cool and skilful hands, the irregulars were steadied by their presence and example, the enemy was kept at bay, and the pursuit eventually died away at a point a few miles short of where the had been left with the waggons Militia. It then became known that some of the rear-guard could not be accounted for. The Curate with one or two others had been seen on foot running hard before some Boers on horseback. Shouts had been heard and the quick rattle of short-range musketry, but what the upshot had been no one seemed to know with any certainty.

The Column was isolated and the situation was by no means

reassuring. The district had been suddenly flooded with hostile detachments which had been skilfully gathered in from afar to deliver their wellplanned attack upon an unsupported force. A prompt decision was called for if serious dangers were to be evaded. It was determined to seek the nearest place of safety, and no sooner had darkness drawn its veil across the bivouac than the column roused itself and stole silently away. It made an all-night march, and by the forenoon of the following day was camped beside a township bristling with entanglements, where sangars crowned the circumjacent koppies, where an infantry garrison was on the watch, where supplies had been amassed in plenty, and which offered a convenient place of arms to serve as starting-point for further operations. Most of the missing men had managed to rejoin, but there was no tidings of the absent Curate, and grave anxiety was felt as to the fate which had befallen him.

shot, as you know," replied the Curate with a deprecating glance at the Second-in-Command, "so I didn't try at his head, but took him low. He was only about ten yards off, and had pulled up, thinking we were going to chuck. The sergeant fired the same time as me, and the sportsman sort of crumpled up, and then he plopped off on his head-you never saw such an almighty splosh. There weren't many kicks left in him I should say, but naturally we hadn't time to bother." And the tale was checked for a moment to allow for the absorbing of some refreshment.

"The Colonel hasn't come to see you eat, but to hear you talk," said the Second-in-Command firmly, but his features had perhaps relaxed a little. His views with regard to junior second lieutenants coincided with those of the SquadronLeader, but he did not enforce them quite so rigidly.

"We started running again," resumed the Curate in a hurry, "and I know I was getting jolly blown. Then somehow we were in that river close beside the road, splashing along and banging our shins against the boulders. Some of the brutes had got off, and were potting at us and weren't making at all bad shootinga little of that sort of thing goes a long way to my mind -but we somehow blundered along to an overhanging kind of bluff place, and we scrambled up and found some tip-top cover, and just then R

and M of my troop turned up too, both with their rifles, and we all squatted down in a huge, great hole." The Curate paused an instant to recover breath and to take in nourishment, and then went on again like one wound up. "Where was I? Oh, I remember! Well, we heard them fairly near us and shouting out to us to 'hands up'; but they didn't seem to hanker after coming very close-maybe it struck them that if they were too familiar they might get a taste of something that they wouldn't like. Anyhow, they gave our funk-hole a wide berth, and we could see them following up the column and heard a lot of firing, and-" At this point a crisp particle missed the way and went down the Curate's "wrong throat," temporarily checking the even flow of his discourse.

So

When partially recovered, he proceeded. "I'm awfully sorry! I was saying-oh, yes! Well, we decided to stop where we were till dark. On climbing up a little way we could see a party off-saddled about half a mile off, and in the meantime the firing was going farther and farther away. we divided what we had in our havresacks-precious little there was-and dossed down all day; but I got the general hang of the country and learnt up the direction to this place from my map, and made up my mind to head for it; you see - (apologetically) — “you might all be mopped up for all we knew. Well, we started off

about eight o'clock, and hit off the road all right, but we had to go cunning, as there were fires of laagers here and there, and we ducked down sharp among the bushes once or twice when we came on mounted parties. We could have done with a bit of moon, but we somehow managed not to lose the road, and gradually seemed to get quite clear of brother Boer. We were all beginning to feel rather beat, so about midnight we lay down and had a rest." And the Curate paused and helped himself to food.

"Take your time, Curate. Nobody's pursuing you now, remarked the Second-in-Command encouragingly.

The Curate took a long drink and started off again like a giant refreshed. "Soon after we got under weigh we spotted a light a little way off the road and found that it was a farm. All seemed snug and quiet, so we decided to reconnoitre carefully and, if there were no Boers about, to draw the place for food and to annex their cape-cart. Our plan did not quite work, however, because the moment we got near the place an infernal dog gave tongue, enough to rouse the dead, so we just banged on the door and trusted to luck. A big, hulking, bearded sort of ruffian came in a minute or two, and we walked right in and told him we must have a bit to eat and that we wanted his cape-cart."

"How did you know he had a cape-cart?" somebody asked.

"They all have cape-carts!" rejoined the Curate with a note of finality in his voice as of one pronouncing the benediction, and the Second-in-Command was observed to nod approval. "The man was uncommonly surly; he got us some old hunks of bread, but he gave us to understand that he would see us to the devil before he handed over his cape - cart. While we were impressing upon him that we meant to have the cart, a female came in-his wife, I suppose; she hadn't any too much clothes on as it seemed to me. She was just beginning to chip in, when a brace of kids crept in-and they had on scarcely any clothes at all. Well, the female jabbered Dutch and the man jabbered Dutch and the kids squeaked Dutch, till the place was like a monkey-house, and I have an idea that the female's language was pretty strongshe looked as if it was. Of course, if the competition had been in English, R and M- would have kept their end up, to say nothing of the sergeant; but we were getting fed up and weren't on for all this chatter. Boers might have dropped in, and anyhow we meant to stand no nonsense. The sergeant was fiddling with the bolt of his rifle (we were all ready-loaded), and I heard R-mutter 'Dead men tell no tales,' and Magree, with 'That's it, mate!' so

"You don't mean to say you shot the man, with his wife and children there and all?" interrupted the Column