ery midst of the battle of the Baltic, Nelson sent a letter to
the Danish Prince Regent, with whom he was then fighting, and
addressed it thus: "To the Danes, the Brothers of Englishmen." Within
little more than half a century from that date the daughter of the
Danish throne became heir to the Queenship of England's throne; and
our Laureate rightly voiced the whole nation's feeling when to that
fair bride he said:

"We are each all Dane in our welcome of thee."

When Nelson penned that strange address amid the flash and fire of
actual battle, it was with the true insight of a seer. The furious
foes of his day are the fast friends of ours, and by the end of
another half-century a similar transformation may be wrought in the
present relationship between Boer and Briton, who are quite as near
akin as Dane and Englishman. But to lightly talk of such foes becoming
friends "in a few days" is to misread the meaning and measure of a
controversy that is more than a century old. Between victors and
vanquished, both of so dogged a type, it requires more than a mere
treaty of peace to beget goodwill.

[Sidenote: _More Boer Slimness._]

Some of these now released prisoners were among the very first to be
captured, and so had spent many weary weeks in the Waterval Prison
near Pretoria, and were among those who had been decoyed away to these
remote and seemingly unassailable mountain fastnesses. They had thus
been in bonds altogether ten interminable months. Multiplied hardships
had during that period necessarily been theirs, and others for which
there was no real need or excuse; but they frankly confessed that as a
whole their treatment by the Boers, though leaving much to be desired,
had seldom been hard or vindictive.

There were others of these prisoners, however, who were sick or
wounded, and therefore were quite unable to climb from the open door
of their prison to our lofty camp; so to fetch these I saw seven
ambulance waggons made ready to set out with the usual complement of
medical orderlies and doctors. These I seriously thought of
accompanying on their errand of mercy, but was mercifully hindered.
Those red cross waggons we saw no more for ever. The Boers were said
to be short of waggons, and asserted that in some way some of our men
had done them recent wrong which they wished to avenge. But whatever
the supposed provocation or pretext, it was in violation of all the
recognised usages of war that those wag