but all in vain; for after each thunderous discharge on our side,
there came a responsive "ping" from the valiant mauser-man on the
other side. Then the whole battalion of Scots Guards was invited to
fire volley after volley in the same delightfully vague fashion, till
it seemed as though no pin point or pimple on the far side of the
gorge could possibly have failed to receive its own particular bullet;
but

"What gave rise to no little surprise,
Nobody seemed one farthing the worse!"

Just as the sun set the last sound we heard was the parting "ping" of
Brother Invisible. So no man might descend into the depths that night,
hotel or no hotel! Even at midnight we were startled out of our sleep
by the quite unexpected boom of our big guns, which had, of course
during daylight, been trained on a farmhouse lying far back from the
precipice opposite to us, and were thus fired in the dead of night
under the impression that the sniper, and perhaps his friends, were
peacefully slumbering there. If so, the chances are he sniped no more.
Next day at noon we began to clamber down to the level of the railway
line, and found ourselves in undisturbed possession, after so
prolonged and costly a bombardment called forth by a single, stubborn
mauser.

[Sidenote: _"He sets the mournful prisoners free."_]

Meanwhile the eighteen hundred English prisoners who had so long been
kept in durance vile at Nooitgedacht, the next station on the rail to
Portuguese Africa, received their unconditional release, with the
exception of a few officers, still retained as hostages; and all the
afternoon, indeed far on into the night, these men came straggling,
now in small groups and now in large, into our expectant and excited
camp. They told us of the crowds of disconsolate Boers, some by road,
some by rail, who had passed their prison enclosure in precipitate
retreat, bearing waggon loads of killed or wounded with them. Among
them were men of almost all nationalities, including a few surviving
members of the late Johannesburg police, who declared that during that
one week they had lost no less than one hundred and fifteen of their
own special comrades.

The prisoners also informed us that the Boer officer who dismissed
them expressed the belief that in a few days more Boer and Briton
would again be friends--an expectation we were slow to share, however
eager we might be to see this miracle of miracles actually wrought. In
the v