st likely, for years on
end in the quietness of the little home; its hands were torn off, and
its works strewn upon the floor. In every house the little bits of
rubbish that adorn the homes of the poor were destroyed or disfigured;
in all were the same signs of violation, the same marks of the beast.

It has always seemed to me that a little farm in a lonely country
contains more than anything else the atmosphere of a home. It is
self-centred; there you see all the little shifts and contrivances which
result from the forced supplying of wants that cannot be satisfied from
outside. And when such a homestead is deserted, I think the atmosphere
is only the more pronounced; the disused implements find voices in the
silence and cry aloud for their absent owners. But when all that is
personal and human in such a place is ruined, the pathos turns to
tragedy. One farm I found absolutely gutted save for a great and old
Bible which stood upon a table in the largest room. It was a beautiful
folio, full of quaint plates and fine old printing, and bound in a rich
leather that time and the sun had tanned to an autumn gold. While I was
regarding it the breeze came through the window and stirred the yellow
leaves, exposing a pencil-marked verse in the most pastoral of psalms:
"_Hy doert my nederliggen in grasige wenden; Hy doert my sachtkens aen
seer stille wateren._" There was something impressive in the accident:
the old book stoutly reminding the chance passer-by that present evil
cannot affect the ultimate good, promising amid rude circumstances a
time of quietness. He was an old man who owned that book; his name and
age were marked upon the leaf; I think, to judge by the signs of
handling, that he had the heart of its contents; and I hope that
whatever his bodily circumstances, his soul retained some of the peace
of the "_grasige wenden_."

Who is responsible for all this mischief it is hard to say. I am sure
that the English soldiers, thoughtless though they may be, would not
stoop to this sort of purposeless outrage. I do not like to accuse the
colonial troops as a whole either, although I suspect that some of them,
some whose own homes had been destroyed by the enemy, might conceivably
have taken vengeance in kind. It is thought by many whose opinion is
valuable that the Kaffirs were here, as in Natal, responsible for much
of the damage; and that is a view which one would willingly take, for it
would acquit English-speaking tr