Cigars that are worth smoking and whisky worth drinking haven't been seen for a week. Hospitals take all the soda-water that the factory can make.
Shoemakers have not even veldschoens in ordinary sizes. They have had no leather for two weeks, so shoe repairing is out of the question.
Winter is coming on, the mornings are already growing chilly, but clothiers have no hose and no heavy underwear of white man's quality. All hats suitable for army wear were sold long ago.
Merchants declare that if they had not been promised two trucks a day by rail they would have brought supplies from Kimberley by ox-waggon. It would have taken six days, but would have been worth while.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Our "Friend" no Longer
We retire from the paper, leaving it in able and patriotic hands.
The unique and delightful episode had ended. On April 16th, just one month after we established this new departure in war, we turned The Friend over to the proprietor of the Johannesburg Star, upon an arrangement quickly and generously made by Lord Stanley. Within a week I was ordered home by the surgeons who saw the state my battered body was in. Mr. Landon preceded me by a few days, invalided also. Mr. Buxton remained upon the paper under its new proprietors, who were old workmates with him, and Mr. Gwynne remained, and yet remains as a war correspondent (January, 1901), sturdily doing his always excellent work in the field. In that work I think he has few superiors among living English-speaking correspondents, and I know that many military and journalistic experts agree with me. The pity is that the nature of his work for Reuter's has kept his genius as a writer practically hidden from the public.
Mr. Shelley took up the photographer's side of the entertaining duel between the men of his calling and the actual and proper artists; Mr. Melton Prior indignantly lamented an indignity or an attempted theft of which he had been the victim. We reported a great football match between the officers of the Gordons and those of the First Contingent of the Royal Canadian Regiment; and, finally, we perpetrated the fourth hoax, in what we called "Our Portrait Gallery." The "portrait" was in each case from the same advertisement block which Mr. Gwynne and I had found on the floor of the Express composing-room, which he had thought nearly enough like Mr. Burdett-Coutts to bear production as a likeness, and which we presently resolved to publish every day as a picture of a different man each time.
The notice of a concert in aid of the Widows' and Orphans' Fund refers to a notable enterprise engineered by the universally distinguished Mr. Bennet Burleigh of the Daily Telegraph, aided by Mr. Maxwell, the very talented correspondent of the Standard, and others. They carried it out with such skill that the entertainment proved the greatest social event, if we may so term it, of the army's sojourn in the capital. Every one of note who was able to be there attended it, and the receipts at the doors and in the competition over the works of Messrs. Prior and Wollen, were very considerable.
Price
One Penny