te's Model School, during the early stages of the war, was utilised
as a prison for the British officers captured by the Boers. How keenly
these brave men felt and secretly resented their ill-fortune they were
too proud to tell, but one of the noblest of them had become,
through the terrors of a disastrous fight, so piteously demented for a
while that he actually wore hanging from his neck a piece of cardboard
announcing that it was he who lost the guns at Colenso. Some of them
would rather have lost their lives than in such fashion have lost
their liberty, and the story which tells how three of them regained
that liberty by escaping from this very prison is one of the most
thrilling among all the records of the war. Most noted of the three is
Winston Churchill, whose own graphic pen has told how he eluded the
most vigilant search and finally reached the sea. But the adventures
of Captain Haldane and his non-commissioned companion reveal yet more
of daring and endurance. Captured at the same time as Churchill, and
through the same cause--the disaster on November 13th to the armoured
train at Chieveley--these two effected their escape long after the hue
and cry on the heels of Churchill had died away. Within what was
supposed to be a day or two of the removal of all the officers to a
more secure "birdcage" outside the town, those two gentlemen vanished
under the floor of their room, through a kind of tiny trap-door that I
have often seen, but which was then partly concealed by a bed, and was
apparently never noticed by their Boer custodians. In this prison
beneath a prison, damp and dark and dismal beyond all describing, and
where there was no room to stand erect, these two officers found
themselves doomed to dwell, not for days merely, but for weeks. They
were of course hunted for high and low, and sought in every
conceivable place except the right place. Food was guardedly passed
down to them by two or three brother officers who shared their secret,
and at last, more dead than alive, they emerged from their dungeon the
moment they discovered the building was deserted, and then daringly
faced the almost hopeless, yet successful, endeavour to smuggle
themselves to far-distant Delagoa Bay. Evidently the element of
romance has not yet died out of this prosaic age!

[Sidenote: _Rev. Adrian Hoffmeyer._]

Strangely sharing the fate of these British prisoners in this Model
School was a godly and gifted minister of the Dutch R