It is a
superb stewardship entrusted to us of God; and "it is required in
stewards that they be found faithful."

[Sidenote: _Over the Vaal at last._]

All that week the Guards continued in hot pursuit of the Boers without
so much as once catching sight of them. Repeatedly, however, we
scrambled through huge patches of Indian or Kaffir corn, enough, so to
say, to feed an army, but all left to rot and perish uncut. It was one
of the few evidences which just then greeted us that war was really
abroad in the land, and that they were no mere autumn manoeuvres in
which we then were taking part. Some of the rightful owners of that
corn were probably among our prisoners of war at St Helena, spending
their mourning days in vainly wondering how long its hateful
unfamiliar waves would keep them captive. Others had, perchance,
themselves been garnered by the great Harvester, who ever gathers his
fattest sheaves hard by the paths of war.

Occasionally we came, in the course of our march, on a
recently-deserted Boer camp, with empty tins strewn all about the
place and the embers of camp fires still glowing, but never so much as
a penny worth of loot lying on the ground. Either they had little to
leave, or else they so utilised the railway in assisting to get their
belongings away that in that respect they had the laugh of us
continually. This final service rendered, the Boers made haste to
prevent the rail being used by us; and so far as time or timidity
would permit, they blew up every bridge, every culvert, as soon as
their last train had crossed it. Fortunately of the long and beautiful
bridge across the Vaal we found only one broad span broken.

About nine o'clock on Sunday morning the troops reached Val Joen's
Drift, the terminal station on the Orange Free State Railway. This
drift it was that President Kruger had once resolved to close against
all traffic in order the more effectually to strangle British trade in
the Transvaal. Another mile or two through prodigiously deep sand,
brought us to the Vaal River coal mines, with their great heaps of
burning cinders or other refuse, which brought vividly to many a north
countryman's remembrances kindred scenes in the neighbourhood of busy
Bradford and prosperous Sunderland.

Then came the great event to which the laborious travel of the last
seven months had steadily led up, the crossing of the Vaal, and the
planting of our victorious feet on Transvaal soil. Here we were
ass