the place, but their valour melted before the determined front of
the besieged, and they drew off, taking their gun with them, their scouts
having warned them that the Australians, with a section of the Royal Horse
Artillery and two guns, were coming upon them from the direction of
Belmont, whilst a body of the 12th Lancers and a battery of artillery were
dashing down from Modder River. The Australians, who are now 720 strong,
the New South Wales Company of 125 men having joined Colonel Head's forces,
remained at Enslin, and entrenched there in order to keep open the line of
communication between General Methuen's army and Orange River; a section of
Royal Horse Artillery and two guns is with them. On half a dozen occasions
the Boers have threatened to sweep down upon them from the hilly country
adjacent, but up to the time of writing nothing serious has occurred.

On Sunday last we heard the sound of heavy firing coming from the direction
of Modder River; scouts coming in informed us that an engagement between
General Methuen's force and the enemy, under the astute General Cronje, had
commenced. Seeing that Australia was liable to remain idle for the time
being, I determined to push on with my assistant, Mr. E. Monger, of
Coolgardie, West Australia. When we arrived at Modder River we found the
fight raging at a spot about four and a half miles beyond Modder River
bridge. Our forces were in possession of the river and the plain beyond;
but General Cronje had entrenched himself in a line of ranges stretching
for several miles across the veldt. So well had the Boer general chosen his
ground, and such good use had he made of the natural advantages of his
position, that the British found themselves face to face with an African
Gibraltar. The frowning rocks were bristling with rifles, which commanded
the plain below, trenches seamed the hillsides in all directions, and in
those trenches lay concealed the picked marksmen of the veldt--men who,
though they know but little of soldiering from a European point of view,
yet had been familiar with the rifle from earliest boyhood; rough and
uncouth in appearance, dressed in farmers' garb, still under those
conditions, fighting under a general they knew and trusted, amidst
surroundings familiar to them from infancy, they were foemen worthy of the
respect of the veteran troops of any nation under heaven.

At every post of vantage Cronje, with consummate generalship, had posted
his arti