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After having lived amongst soldiers in some ways and in spite of their profession the most human and civilised of men it had come upon me as a shock to find in Kimberley the same bloodthirstiness that had distinguished the more thoughtless section of the public at home.

With her sister, Lady Alice Santerre, who had been the intended bride of the deceased heir to the Gallowbay Estate, Kimberley felt on a different footing. He had hardly ever been so much at ease with anybody in his life as this young lady made him.

The Orange Free State, relieved of the diamond fields which belonged to it in the neighbourhood of Kimberley in 1870, pursued the even tenor of its way; but the gold mines discovered in the Transvaal were not so near its borders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions.

The most effective issue of this week's movements would be a battle leading to the thorough defeat, the military destruction, of the Boer army before Kimberley. A less valuable result would be the raising of the siege of Kimberley without fighting, a result which is not to be preferred, because a force that retires before battle has to be fought later on.

The obstacle was French's attenuated Cavalry Division which, in obedience to Kitchener's summons, had left Kimberley before sunrise that morning, and after a march of twenty-six miles had reached the spot indicated by Kitchener for the heading of Cronje. As the Boer wagons were about to cross Vendutie Drift the shells of French's Horse Artillery began to fall upon them.

Wherever French has gone he has done well, but his crowning glory was the movement from Kimberley to head off Cronje's retreat. The exertions which the mounted men had made in the relief of Kimberley have been already recorded. They arrived there on Thursday with their horses dead beat.

The Boer forces continued to approach Kimberley, and on October 4, a week before war began, advanced bodies were within twelve miles. By October 7 the earthworks were so far forward that Kekewich considered the place practically safe against any attempt on the part of the enemy to rush it suddenly.

He has every thing, not that he wants, but that he thinks that he wants. The work of his life is merely play. He is going to marry a wife, not who is, but whom he thinks to be perfection. He looks as though he were never ill a day in his life. How would he do if he were grubbing for diamonds amidst the mud and dust of Kimberley?

"There has been very little moving about of burghers from one part of the Transvaal or Free State to the other.... In the latter, the eastern commandos have gone to Natal, the western ones to Kimberley, and to the southern ones, numbering probably less than 4,000 men altogether, have been left the double task of invading Cape Colony and keeping off the Basutos; and as the ordinary Free State burgher is much more anxious about his own farm than about turning our colony upside down, the result is that practically nothing has been done to attack the most vulnerable point in our defence."

Ahead of his troops, fresh and vigorous, as though he had only just started, he proudly rides into the town. The people gather round and cheer; they almost worship the soldiers who have brought them relief, and then, secure for the first time for four long months, they turn to greet friends and relatives, and the glad intelligence spreads far and wide Kimberley is relieved!