re, picking out, in its
old familiar way, the gilt lettering on the books ranged about. It was
sweet to go back to all this, even down the scorching path of fever.

Our stay at Cape Town was coming to its close.

The first trial was called for April 24, and my husband insisted upon
going back to meet his sentence. Drs. Thomas and Scholtz declared this
most unadvisable. His heart was in such condition, any shock might
prove fatal. Their reports were forwarded to the Transvaal Government,
and I begged for a few days' reprieve, cabling my urgent request to
Mr. Olney in Washington, Dr. Coster at Pretoria, and our faithful
friend, Mr. Robert Chapin, United States Consul at Johannesburg. Mr.
Olney _at once_ petitioned the Boer Government in our behalf. Dr.
Coster answered curtly by wiring Mr. Chapin that John Hays Hammond was
summoned to appear before the High Court of the Transvaal on the
morning of April 24, at 10 o'clock. To me he vouchsafed no word.

Letters came from friends in Johannesburg begging my husband not to
return, and cables from the United States to the same effect. The
sentence was sure to be a death sentence or a term of long
imprisonment.

From important sources, which for obvious reasons I cannot quote, I
received private messages and letters informing of a plan on foot to
lynch the leaders. The beam from which four Boers had been hung years
before at Schlaagter's Nek (Oh! that poisonous suggestion in the
'Volksstem') had already been brought from the Colony for this special
purpose. Mr. Manion, the Consular Agent, and Mr. K.B. Brown, an
American just arrived in Cape Town from the Rand, took me aside and
laid the case in all its bare brutality before me. _To allow my
husband to return to Pretoria was for him to meet certain death_. If
he were not lynched by the excited Boers, he was sure to get a death
sentence. Mr. Brown showed feeling as he plead with me to use a wife's
influence to save her husband's life. My head was swimming. I could
only repeat in a dull, dogged way: 'He says his honour takes him
back. He is the father of my sons, and I'd rather see him dead than
dishonoured.'

Somehow I got to my room, and the page-boy stumbled over me at the
door some time afterward, and ran for Mrs. Cavanagh. When I felt a
little recovered, I put on my hat, and, not waiting for my husband's
return from an appointment with Dr. Thomas, I drove to the office of
Mr. Rose Innes. He was not in, and his clerk decla