"Why, man, then what are you talking about? You'd ride in to Winnipeg, twenty miles, to get a paper if you were at home."
Mr. Kipling on this day wrote a tribute to General Joubert, whose death had just been made known to us. Hours after he wrote the poem, when tired of waiting to see the proof, he walked over to the printing-office, broke in by way of a window, and set up the last line of it at one of the printers' cases. What the printers thought of him we never knew, but he never forgot that the first bit of paper he picked up from the floor of the editorial room, when he was looking for something that had fallen from the table, was a violent attack upon himself in a piece of a Free State newspaper.
The only bit of all our work that our compositors saved was this poem to Joubert. That and a portrait of the late firebrand, Borckenhagen, were the only ornaments they deemed worthy to decorate their composing-room walls.
There were at least two English-speaking men among them. I grant to them the benefit of the doubt whether my reflections should extend to them also.
THE FRIEND.
(Edited by the War Correspondents with Lord Roberts' Force.)
No. 12.]
[Price One Penny
BLOEMFONTEIN, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1900.