ponent retorted
he smiled blandly and admonished him: "Ton't lose yer demper."

In the Assembly, if nowhere else, rumbled the menace of coming war.

One other feature there was that was not Capetown. Along Adderley
Street, before the steamship companies' offices, loafed a thick string
of sun-reddened, unshaven, flannel-shirted, corduroy-trousered British
working-men. Inside the offices they thronged the counters six deep.
Down to the docks they filed steadily with bundles to be penned in the
black hulls of homeward liners. Their words were few and sullen. These
were the miners of the Rand--who floated no companies, held no shares,
made no fortunes, who only wanted to make a hundred pounds to furnish a
cottage and marry a girl.

They had been turned out of work, packed in cattle-trucks, and had come
down in sun by day and icy wind by night, empty-bellied, to pack off
home again. Faster than the ship-loads could steam out the trainloads
steamed in. They choked the lodging-houses, the bars, the streets.
Capetown was one huge demonstration of the unemployed. In the hotels and
streets wandered the pale, distracted employers. They hurried hither and
thither and arrived nowhither; they let their cigars go out, left their
glasses half full, broke off their talk in the middle of a word. They
spoke now of intolerable grievance and hoarded revenge, now of silent
mines, rusting machinery, stolen gold. They held their houses in
Johannesburg as gone beyond the reach of insurance. They hated
Capetown, they could not tear themselves away to England, they dared not
return to the Rand.

This little quiet corner of Capetown held the throbbing hopes and fears
of all Johannesburg and more than half the two Republics and the mass of
all South Africa.

None doubted--though many tried to doubt--that at last it was--war! They
paused an instant before they said the word, and spoke it softly. It had
come at last--the moment they had worked and waited for--and they knew
not whether to exult or to despair.

II.

THE ARMY CORPS--HAS NOT LEFT ENGLAND!

A LITTLE PATCH OF WHITE TENTS--A DREAM OF DISTANCE--THE DESERT OF
THE KARROO--WAR AT LAST--A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT HEADQUARTERS--WAITING
FOR THE ARMY CORPS.

STORMBERG JUNCTION.

The wind screams down from the naked hills on to the little junction
station. A platform with dining-room and telegraph office, a few
corrugated iron sheds, the station-master's corrugated iron