ond, who made
the Ministers more or less ridiculous in the eyes of the country by
causing them to dance like puppets at their bidding. It was in the House
of Assembly--where he was a whale amongst minnows--that the void was so
acutely felt surrounding the vacant seat so long occupied by Mr. Rhodes,
and it was not an encouraging sight, for those of his supporters who
tried to carry on his traditions, to gaze on the sparsely filled ranks
of the Progressive Party, and then at the crowded seats of the Bond on
the other side.

We were told, by people who had met the Boer Generals on their recent
visit to the colony, that these latter were not in the least cast down
by the result of the war; that they simply meant to bide their time and
win in the Council Chamber what they had lost on the battle-field; that
the oft-reiterated sentence, "South Africa for the Dutch," was by no
means an extinct volcano or a parrot-cry of the past. It was evident
that political feeling was, in any case, running very high; it almost
stopped social intercourse, it divided families. To be a member of the
Loyal Women's League was sufficient to be ostracized in any Dutch
village, the Boers pretending that the name outraged their feelings, and
that distinctions between loyal and disloyal were invidious.
Federation--Mr. Rhodes's great ideal--which has since come rapidly and
triumphantly to be an accomplished fact, was then temporarily relegated
to the background; the Bond, apparently, had not made up their minds to
declare for it, but they were hard at work in their old shrewd way,
obtaining influence by getting their own men appointed to vacancies at
the post-office and in the railway departments, while the Loyalists
appeared to be having almost as bad a time as in the old days before the
war. At the present moment, in spite of all the good-will borne to the
new Union of South Africa by great and small in all lands where the
British flag flies, it is well to remember, without harbouring any
grudge, certain incidents of the past. A thorough knowledge of the
people which are to be assimilated with British colonists is absolutely
necessary, that all may in the end respect, as well as like, each other.

From Cape Town, where my sister transacted a great deal of business
connected with the winding-up of the Yeomanry Hospital, we went to
Bloemfontein, and were the guests at Government House of my old Mafeking
friend, Sir Hamilton Gould Adams, promoted to th