2ND BATT. THE ROYAL WARWICKSHIRE, REGT.,
THE CAMP,
COLCHESTER.
28th Sept., 1899.

MY DEAR MAMMA,--

I packed Donald off to school to-day in good time and
cold-less.... He was wonderfully calm and collected. He was
more at his ease in our mess than I should have been in a
strange mess, and made himself agreeable to his neighbours
without being forward. Also he looked very clean and smart,
and was altogether quite a success.

That child has a future before him if his energy is up to
form, which I hope. His philosophy is most amazing. He looks
remarkably healthy, and is growing nicely....

Shortly after this letter was written the South African War broke out,
and before six months were over the writer was killed in action, at
the age of 27, whilst serving with the Mounted Infantry at Paardeberg.

It was the first sorrow of Donald's life, but six months later he was
to suffer a yet more crushing blow in the loss of his dearly loved
mother. The loss of his best confidante and his ideal seemed at first
to stun the boy completely, and to cast him in upon himself entirely.
Later on he remembered that he had felt at that time that he had
nothing to say to any one. He had wondered what the others could have
thought of him, and had thought how dreadfully unresponsive they must
be finding him. His sister should have been of some use. But she
can only think of herself then as of some strange figure, veiled
and petrified with grief--grief _not_ for her mother, but for the
young hero whose magnetism had thrilled through every moment of her
life--yet pointing onwards, with mutely insistent finger, to the
path that her hero had trodden. And Donald, dazed also himself by
grief--though from another cause--of his own accord, placed his first
uncertain steps on the road that leads to military glory. No "voice"
warned him as yet, and he had no other decisive leading.

If his sister failed him then, his father did not. Of him Donald wrote
recently to an aunt, "Papa's letters to me are a heritage whose value
can never diminish. His was indeed the pen of a ready writer, and
in his case, as in the case of many rather reserved people, the pen
did more justice to the man than the tongue. I never knew him until
Mamma's death, when the weekly letter from him took the place of hers,
and never stopped till I came home."

At Rugby, Donald was accounted a dreamer. Without the outlet he
had hith