le country almost as
good as any balloon's. The Boer laagers have increased in size, and are
not so carefully hidden.

Beside the railway at the foot of "Long Tom's" hill near Modder Spruit,
there was quite a large camp of Boer tents and three trains as usual.
They say the Boers have put their prisoners from the Royal Irish
Fusiliers here, but it is unlikely they should bring them back from
Pretoria. The tents of another large camp showed among the bushes on
Lombard's Nek, where the Helpmakaar road passes between Lombard's Kop
and Bulwan, and many waggon laagers were in sight beyond. At the foot of
the flat-topped Middle Hill on the south-west, the Boers have placed two
more guns to trouble the Manchesters further. But our defences along the
whole ridge are now very strong.

In the afternoon they buried Dr. Stark in the cemetery between the river
and the Helpmakaar road. I don't know what has become of a kitten which
he used to carry about with him in a basket when he went to spend the
day under the shelter of the river bank.

_November 20, 1899._

"Gentlemen," said Sir George White to his Staff, "we have two things to
do--to kill time and to kill Boers--both equally difficult." The siege
is becoming intolerably tedious. It is three weeks to-day since "Black
Monday," when the great disaster befell us, and we seem no nearer the
end than we were at first. We console ourselves with the thought that we
are but a pawn on a great chessboard. We hope we are doing service by
keeping the main Boer army here. We hope we are not handed over for
nothing to _ennui_ enlivened by sudden death. But the suspicion will
recur that perhaps the army hedging us in is not large after all. It is
a bad look-out if, as Captain Lambton put it, we are being "stuck up by
a man and a boy."

Nothing is so difficult to estimate as Boer numbers, and we never take
enough account of the enemy's mobility. They can concentrate rapidly at
any given point and gain the appearance of numbers which they don't
possess. However, the balloon reports the presence of laagers of ten
commandoes in sight. We may therefore assume about as many out of sight,
and consider that we are probably doing our duty as a pawn.

This morning the Boers hardly gave a sign of life, except that just
before noon "Puffing Billy" shelled a platelayer's house on the flat
beyond the racecourse, in the attempt to drive out our scouts who were
making a defended position of it.