And with it all there is the melinite and the shrapnel. To be sure they
give us the only pin-prick of interest to be had in Ladysmith. It is
something novel to live in this town turned inside out.

Where people should be, the long, long day from dawn to daylight shows
only a dead blank.

Where business should be, the sleepy shop-blinds droop. But where no
business should be--along the crumbling ruts that lead no
whither--clatters waggon after waggon, with curling whip-lashes and
piles of bread and hay.

Where no people should be--in the clefts at the river-bank, in bald
patches of veldt ringed with rocks, in overgrown ditches--all these you
find alive with men and beasts.

The place that a month ago was only fit to pitch empty meat-tins into is
now priceless stable-room; two squadrons of troop-horses pack flank to
flank inside its shelter. A scrub-entangled hole, which perhaps nobody
save runaway Kaffirs ever set foot in before, is now the envied
habitation of the balloon. The most worthless rock-heap below a
perpendicular slope is now the choicest of town lots.

The whole centre of gravity of Ladysmith is changed. Its belly lies no
longer in the multifarious emporia along the High Street, but in the
earth-reddened, half-in visible tents that bashfully mark the
commissariat stores. Its brain is not the Town Hall, the best target in
Ladysmith, but Headquarters under the stone-pocked hill. The riddled
Royal Hotel is its social centre no longer; it is to the trench-seamed
Sailors' Camp or the wind-swept shoulders of Caesar's Camp that men go to
hear and tell the news.

Poor Ladysmith! Deserted in its markets, repeopled in its wastes; here
ripped with iron splinters, there rising again into rail-roofed,
rock-walled caves; trampled down in its gardens, manured where nothing
can ever grow; skirts hemmed with sandbags and bowels bored with
tunnels--the Boers may not have hurt us, but they have left their mark
for years on her.

They have not hurt us much--and yet the casualties mount up. Three
to-day, two yesterday, four dead or dying and seven wounded with one
shell--they are nothing at all, but they mount up. I suppose we stand at
about fifty now, and there will be more before we are done with it.

And then there are moments when even this dribbling bombardment can be
appalling.

I happened into the centre of the town one day when the two big guns
were concentrating a cross-fire upon it.

First from one side t