miss a chance. He was surrounded by a little knot of
middle-aged and elderly Boers, most of them holding subordinate commands
under himself.

"Whirr!" The screech of a shrapnel sailing over the foremost lines. It
falls into the river, throwing up the mud with a tremendous splash.
Another and another. This last, better aimed, strikes among the rear
lines--result as before: agony, wounds, death. At the same time another
hits the kopje not many yards below, exploding in all directions with
appalling effect.

The splinters fly from an ironstone boulder not two yards distant, but
Andries Botma does not move a muscle. One Boer in the group utters a
mild ejaculation, and then is seen to be winding a bit of oiled rag,
kept for gun-sponging purposes, around his middle finger. Through this
rude bandage the blood slowly oozes, but nobody seems to think the
circumstance worthy of remark. Colvin is conscious of a creeping
sensation in the region of the spine, as the jagged iron explodes around
him with vicious metallic hiss. And the voices of the long-range duel
undergo no diminution, the deep-mouthed boom of the heavy guns, and the
sharp, snapping bark of the smaller ones.

Things, however, are not destined to continue that way. As the hours
wear on the advance of the attacking force is made out. From this part
of the field the latter can be seen in skirmishing order, drawing nearer
and nearer; those khaki-clad dots on the great brown expanse affording
but an insignificant mark. And then there begins the sound of
rifle-shooting, literally as "the crackling of thorns under a pot."
Down and along the lines it sweeps, in waves of sharp staccato sounds,
and the spludges of dust, before and behind those khaki lines of
advancing skirmishers, but mostly before, are like the dropping of water
on red-hot iron. Now, too, it is near enough to mark the effect of
those deadly volleys. That inexorable advance continues, but as it does
it leaves behind lines of dead and dying and grievously wounded. Not
all on one side, though, is the red slaughter. Here among the patriot
trenches men are falling, and falling fast. Shell after shell, too,
drops into the little township, and the crash of shattered brickwork,
and the shrill clangour of battered-in corrugated iron, mingles with the
gradating roar of projectiles, as they leave each grim nozzle
sentinelling miles and miles of that sullen river front.

Those on the kopje are now we