blow, and the tears had come into his eyes. ' And I believed she loved me!'

'I didn't!' said Lady Champer with some curtness.

He gazed about; he almost rocked; and, unconscious of her words, he appealed, inarticulate and stricken. At last, however, he found his voice. 'What on earth, then, shall I do? I can less than ever go back to mamma!'

She got up for him, she thought for him, pushing a better chair into her circle. Stay here with me, and I'll ring for tea.

Sit there nearer the fire-you're cold.'

Awfully!' he confessed as he sank. And I believed she loved me!' he repeated as he stared at the fire.

'I didn't!' Lady Champer once more declared. This time, visibly, he heard her, and she immediately met his wonder. No —it was all the rest; your great historic position, the glamour of your name and your past. Otherwise what she stood out for wouldn't be excusable. But she has the sense of such things, and they were what she loved.' So, by the fire, his hostess explained it, while he wondered the more.

'I thought that last summer you told me just the contrary.'

It seemed, to do her justice, to strike her. 'Did I? Oh, well, how does one know? With Americans one is lost!'

FROM THE BOER REPUBLICS.

AT the present moment when all eyes are turned to Johannesburg, a brief account of a visit I was permitted to make to the Fort there may have a certain interest. The more so that I am told, on good authority, that I am believed to be the only Englishman who has been inside it. I had come back from Rhodesia in the winter of 1897, and was staying for a short time on the Rand before my return to England. While there I happened to make the acquaintance of Mr. Krause, the Public Prosecutor, who very kindly took me over the police courts, and explained to me fully the system on which they were worked. In most respects, I am bound to say, it seemed to me to be admirable. There was an evident desire on the part of the Boers to rule justly and equitably, but there was quite as evidently a great deal of race friction, a harsh and unconciliatory manner among the Boer officials, and the same refusal on the part of a large section of the Outlanders to credit the Government with honesty either of purpose or of execution, which has unhappily characterised the Irish with regard to our own administration of Ireland.

In many ways Johannesburg is a beautiful town, but it was not a pleasant place to live in. There was an unreal feeling about it, of its being to most of its inhabitants only a temporary abiding place, and not one which they could ever come to regard as their permanent home. Besides this there was an impending feeling of insecurity and unrest, an atmosphere loaded with suspicion and distrust, and now and again mutterings of the storm that has since broken. The town was fairly well governed, and there were fewer murders and crimes of violence than in most other cities of the same size. There was no oppression so far as I could learn (and I spent three months there in the early part of the year), but there was an utter disbelief in and dislike to each other which made friendly intereourse between the British and the Dutch almost impossible. This feeling of animosity the press on both sides had done its best to fan, until at last both races seemed to have made up their minds for war. The British were always talking about it, the papers kept constantly harping on the possi

bility of it, and the Boers were quietly preparing for it. They felt sure, they said, that it must come sooner or later; and the same feeling was apparent in Bloemfontein, although not so strongly as in the Transvaal.

President Steyn remarked to me one day, 'We don't want to fight, but you have taken the Hinterland away from us, and there is nowhere left for us to trek to, and if you force us to fight we must just die where we stand.' They felt they could not get a fair hearing. One of the Boer officials in Pretoria told me they were confident they would be perfectly safe if they were in Lord Salisbury's hands, but that they did not trust Mr. Chamberlain. We believe,' he said, 'that he intends to drive us into war, and to take our country from us.'

Still, it is only fair to the Boers to state that, although they avowed their aversion to Mr. Chamberlain quite unreservedly, they did not accuse him of complicity in the Raid; his prompt action at the time seemed to them sufficient disproof of that; but they believed him to be actuated by a rooted hostility to the Transvaal, and that he meant to bring about war if he possibly could. It was the Rhodes party who kept asserting that Mr. Chamberlain was implicated in it, and the Dutch can hardly be blamed if at last they gave credit to their assertions.

Indeed, what struck me particularly was the singular fairness shown by the Dutch even when their feelings were most strongly aroused. I will give a couple of instances. I was talking to Mr. Fischer in Bloemfontein about the Raid, and I asked him whether the Boers thought that Mr. Rhodes was influenced by sordid motives. 'No,' he said, 'we don't. We can never forgive him for what he did, and we can never again trust him. But we do not accuse him of having done it for money; we think it was for a misplaced ambition.'

President Steyn was equally ready to consider his opponents' view of the question. Chief Justice de Villiers had written an article in The Nineteenth Century' on the treatment of the Free State by Great Britain with regard to Basutoland. Before I left Bloemfontein he gave me this to read, and also Sir Henry Stanley's reply, and a subsequent rejoinder of his own. While I was away I had my attention called to a despatch of Sir Philip Wodehouse, written in 1868, which seemed to put quite a different complexion on some of the Chief Justice's conclusions. On my return to Bloemfontein, as the Chief Justice was away, I went to President

Steyn and asked him if I might see this despatch, and he said certainly, but that he did not believe the Chief Justice could be wrong, as he was a very careful man. Nevertheless, he very kindly had a copy of the whole despatch made for me, with President Brand's answer, and when I came to look through it, it bore out fully the Chief Justice's contention.

President Steyn himself is a singularly frank, unassuming, straightforward man, a member of one of the English Inns of Court, and married to a wife of half Scotch descent. He had an exceedingly cordial feeling towards individual Englishmen, although he made no concealment of his entire distrust of Great Britain as a government. The same distrust, indeed, existed among the Dutch all over South Africa.

The war, in fact, has been brewing for years, and is due to faults on both sides-to Boer suspicion, unfriendliness, and distrust, and to our own want of political sympathy, and of comprehension of the Boer character. When two strong proud races clash, war must sooner or later be the result, unless the greatest tact and forbearance be exercised; only it would have been better for our future relations with the Dutch, as well as more consistent with truth, if we could have based our quarrel avowedly upon race antagonism, instead of being misled into accusing the Boers of all sorts of barbarities and iniquities of which they have assuredly not been guilty.

Anthony Trollope's opinion of them in 1878 is worth quoting, for it is just as true now as it was then. 'It has been imagined by some people I must acknowledge to have received such an impression myself that the Boer was a European, who had retrograded from civilisation and had become savage, barbarous, and unkindly. There can be no greater mistake. The courtesies of life are as dear to him as to any European. The circumstances of his secluded life have made him unprogressive. It may, however, be that the same circumstances have maintained with him that hospitality for strangers, and easy unobtrusive familiarity of manners, which the contrasts and rapidity of modern life have banished from us in Europe. The Dutch Boer, with all his roughness, is a gentleman from his head to his heels' ('South Africa,' vol. ii. p. 329).

But to return to the question of the Fort. After I had seen the police court, I asked Mr. Krause if there would be any objection to my inspecting the gaol. He said there would be

none, and made an appointment a few days ahead for Dr. Cecil Schulz, the civil surgeon of Johannesburg, who was in medical charge of the gaol, to accompany us.

The gaol, I should explain, is inside the Fort, but separated from it by a high wall, so that the prisoners have no means of acquiring any information about it.

When the appointed time came, to my surprise, Mr. Krause informed me that he had obtained special permission from Pretoria to show me the Fort also.

At the end of our inspection I asked him if I was at liberty to make public what I had seen, and he replied that I had been taken over it with the express understanding that I intended to do so. Unfortunately my knowledge of military matters was of the slightest, and although I told several people in Johannesburg about my visit, I did not attempt any written description, as I knew nothing of any other forts which I could use as a standard of comparison.

Unlike Pretoria, which lies in a narrow cup-shaped valley, Johannesburg is built on the slope of the bare treeless downs which constitute the Witwatersrand. The Fort has been erected on the crest of the hill, and dominates the whole of the town which lies outstretched beneath it. It also commands the level summit of the hill on both sides to the right and left, and a distance of a mile to a mile and a half of level ground at the back which extends between it and where the hillside breaks abruptly away into a valley lying nearly a thousand feet below.

It is an ideal position for a fort, for it would be impossible for an enemy to approach it unobserved, or, if the houses in its immediate vicinity were destroyed, to obtain cover while making an attack.

The walls of the Fort consist of sloping banks of earth about 30 feet in height, crowned on the top by an embrasured parapet. Inside these earth banks are bomb-proof concrete chambers for the men to live in, and within the gaol is a well, so that there is no danger of a scarcity of water. At the time of our visit the Fort was only just finished, and the guns had not yet arrived. I was told they were on their way out, and were expected in about a month's time, and I was shown both where the big guns were to be placed, and also the Maxims for enfilading the glacis. This was in January 1898-just two years after the Raid-and that the Fort should have been then still uncompleted gces some way to prove