caressingly around the wealth of growing fodder, biting the
grass low down, and wrapping it in a mantle of black and red, as flame and
smoke commingle.

Here and there a pool of water, hidden from view until the fire fiend
stripped the veldt land bare, leaps to life like a silver shield in the
grim setting of the bare and blackened plain. Small mobs of cattle stand
stupidly snuffing the smoke-laden air, until the breath of the blaze
awakens them to a sense of peril; then, with horns lowered like bayonets at
the charge, with tails stiff and straight behind them as levelled lances,
they leap onward, over or through everything in front of them, bellowing
frantically their brute beast protest against the red ruin of war. The
flames roll on; they reach the stone walls of a cattle pen, and leap it as
a hunter takes a brush fence in his stride; onward still, until a Kaffir
kraal is reached. The soft-lipped billows kiss the uncouth mud wall, and
for a moment transfigure them with a nameless beauty, the beauty that
precedes ruin. Only a moment or two, and then the resistless destroyer
flaunts its pennons amidst the reed-thatched roofs; the sparks leap up, the
black smoke curls towards the sky, whilst on the neighbouring hills the
negro women, with their babes in their arms, wail woefully, for those rude
huts, with all their barbarous trappings, meant home--aye, home and
happiness--to them. The flames roll onward now in two long lines, for the
Kaffir encampment had sundered them, and now they look, with their
beautifully rounded curves sweeping so gracefully out into the unknown,
like the rich, ripe lips of a wanton woman in the pride of her shameless
beauty. All that they leave behind is desolation, darkness, despair, ruin
unutterable, only blackened walls, simmering carcases, weeping women, and
wailing children.

Away on our right flank we can just make out the skeletons of what a few
hours before had been a cluster of smiling farmhouses. They do not smile
now; they grin horribly in the sunlight, grin as the fleshless skulls of
dead men grin on a battlefield after those sextons of the veldt the
grey-hooded, curved-beaked vultures have screamed their final farewell to
the charnel-houses of war--noble war, splendid war, pastime of potentates
and princes, invented in hell and patented in all the temples of sorrow.

As we look on those grim relics of this dreary time we catch the maddening
sound of distant guns. The chargers prick