This wet weather does put me in mind of the Pyrenees—that cold camp we had on the very top of them, when our tent was floored with large cold stones, the only time I ever smoked a little, when you made me a little paper segar, and tea, too, to drink with it.
It is so cold, too; however, cold or no cold, in future, if I campaign again in a friend’s country, my Juana must be of the party; I cannot again be separated. But in this savage warfare, it would have been folly, nay, the height of cruelty, to have brought you.
Half-past 12.—Hang the rain! it has begun again as hard as ever.
Oh, how I see you now, I think, at Government House in your fancy dress, your dearest shape so divulged, aquella gracia Española, the remembrance of our youthful days and what you have gone through for me, brought back by the costume; all the room admiring you and your dress, and in that room one heart in which the universal admiration is concentrated, because he knows that love of a woman is his own, and knows what others do not—the qualities of her mind, the generosity of her heart, the superiority of her character, void of all littleness, the strength of mind of a noble-hearted man, the soft feelings and affection of the most delicate of her sex!—
“Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,
But framed for all the witching arts of love.”
I see you sitting thus dressed at dinner. How I watch you sometimes when I see you animated, your dear full bosom heaving, your eyes flashing fire, whilst with a heart of innocence and joy you are recounting some of our old campaigning stories, and the listeners wonder that a creature so delicately framed could have endured such awful fatigue and for one unworthy of her! Oh, God bless her!
5 o’clock.—My master has just sent me a confidential communication which in the strictest confidence I impart to my own soul for her, her sacred ear alone. It is a copy of his ultimate treaty of peace with Hintza when the latter has fulfilled the engagements of his former treaty; a copy, that is to say, of his proclamation declaring the territory conquered up to the Kei to belong to his Britannic Majesty, including the territory beyond the T’somo. That is, the new boundary-line of this colony is to extend to the sea, up the Kei, following the course of the T’somo to the Stormberg. It will include a most magnificent track of country, I assure you.
The whole is framed upon various conversations which I have had with him.
I have just sent for Umtini, and have desired him to tell Hintza that as two days have passed beyond the time named in the Treaty and he has done next to nothing to fulfil it, he, his son, Boku and Vadana with their retinue, are our prisoners-of-war, and that we now demand the 50,000 cattle and the 1000 horses before he is liberated. Umtini began a parley, but as usual I took hold of the Treaty of Peace, thumped it and gave him “the word,” then assumed the civil and asked him what he wanted. He said, a sheep, some biscuit, and some tobacco. We shook hands, and so we parted.