eking. He gave no direct answer, but remarked: "I received so many
messages from day to day, now telling me to come, then to delay
starting, that I thought it best to make up their minds for them, before
the Boers had time to get together."

We were soon hurried on shore, as Mr. Beresford,[8] the 7th Hussars, who
had brought the prisoners on board, had to return to the town to make
some necessary purchases for them, in the way of clothes, for they
possessed nothing but what they stood up in.

We left Durban immediately by train for Pietermaritzburg, where we were
the guests of Sir Walter and Lady Hely Hutchinson, at Government House,
a very small but picturesque residence where Lady Hely Hutchinson
received us most kindly in the absence of her husband, who was in the
Transvaal, superintending the departure of the remaining prisoners. Here
we seemed to have left warlike conditions behind us, for the town was
agog with the excitement of a cricket-match, between Lord Hawke's eleven
and a Natal fifteen. On the cricket-field we met again two of our
_Tantallon Castle_ fellow-passengers, Mr. Guest and Mr. H. Milner, who
had come down from Johannesburg with the cricketers. We were interested
to compare notes and to hear Mr. Milner's adventures, which really made
us smile, though they could hardly have been a laughing matter to him at
the time. He told us that, after twice visiting Captain C. Coventry, who
was wounded in the Raid, at the Krugersdorp Hospital without
molestation, on the third occasion, when returning by train to
Johannesburg, he was roughly pulled out of his carriage at ten o'clock
at night, and told that, since he had no passport, he was to be
arrested on the charge of being a spy. In vain did he tell them that
only at the last station his passport had been demanded in such
peremptory terms that he had been forced to give it up. They either
would not or could not understand him. In consequence the poor man
tasted the delights of a Boer gaol for a whole night, and, worst
indignity of all, had for companions two criminals and a crowd of dirty
Kaffirs. The following morning, he said, his best friend would not have
known him, so swollen and distorted was his face from the visitations of
the inseparable little companions of the Kaffir native. He was liberated
on bail next day, and finally set free, with a scanty apology of
mistaken identity. At any other time such an insult to an Englishman
would have made some stir