tramped in at lunch-time, going a bit short some of them,
nearly all a trifle stiff on the feet, but solid, square, and sturdy
from the knees upward. They straightened up to the cheers that met them,
and stepped out on scorching feet as if they were ready to go into
action again on the instant. After them came the guns--not the sleek
creatures of Laffan's Plain, rough with earth and spinning mud from
their wheels, but war-worn and fresh from slaughter; you might imagine
their damp muzzles were dripping blood. You could count the horses'
ribs; they looked as if you could break them in half before the
quarters. But they, too, knew they were being cheered; they threw their
ears up and flung all the weight left them into the traces.

Through fire, water, and earth, the Dundee column had come home again.

IX.

THE STORY OF NICHOLSON'S NEK.

AN ATTENUATED MESS--A REGIMENT 220 STRONG--A MISERABLE STORY--THE
WHITE FLAG--BOER KINDNESS--ASHAMED FOR ENGLAND.

LADYSMITH, _Nov. 1_.

The sodden tents hung dankly, black-grey in the gusty, rainy morning. At
the entrance to the camp stood a sentry; half-a-dozen privates moved to
and fro. Perhaps half-a-dozen were to be seen in all--the same hard,
thick-set bodies that Ladysmith had cheered six days before as they
marched in, square-shouldered through the mud, from Dundee. The same
bodies--but the elastic was out of them and the brightness was not in
their eyes. But for these few, though it was an hour after _reveille_,
the camp was cold and empty. It was the camp of the Royal Irish
Fusiliers.

An officer appeared from the mess-tent--pale and pinched. I saw him when
he came in from Dundee with four sleepless nights behind him; this
morning he was far more haggard. Inside were one other officer, the
doctor, and the quarter-master. That was all the mess, except a second
lieutenant, a boy just green from Sandhurst. He had just arrived from
England, aflame for his first regiment and his first campaign. And this
was the regiment he found.

They had been busy half the night packing up the lost officers' kits to
send down to Durban. Now they were packing their own; a regiment 220
strong could do with a smaller camp. The mess stores laid in at
Ladysmith stood in open cases round the tent. All the small luxuries the
careful mess-president had provided against the hard campaign had been
lost at Dundee. Now it was the regiment was lost, and there was nobody
to eat the t