The italics in the above advertisement are inserted here, and were not in the newspaper. They suggest what novel forms advertisements would often take if the advertisers always truthfully explained why they wished to part with their property.
W. A. Koller, the town clerk, notified all residents to call upon him and make a true statement of the _bonâ fides_ of all their possessions in horseflesh. Captain P. Holland-Pryor, A.A.G., requested every burgher who had not given up any Government horse in his possession to do so without delay. Truly, the horse occupied a large share of interest and attention--much larger now that we were in need of horses than when they had come in abundance from every corner of the earth.
We published a remarkable address to the Free Staters by the Rev. A. A. Van der Lingen, once a candidate for the Presidency. He asked them if it was right for them to assail the peaceful territories of the British when thousands of their kith and kin are enjoying a full and perfect measure of equality and justice. He demanded to know "what you think seriously, in your own minds, will become of you if you prosecute the war and lose." The "old soldiers of Bloemfontein"--it seems there were eight retired veterans--cheered the Field-Marshal with an address.
[Illustration: _Julian Ralph and his horse "Rattlesnake._"]
Our five-guinea competition for the renaming of the Colony went on apace, and we recorded a great day of sport among the men of the Sixth Division, who enjoyed the band of the Buffs and the pipes of the Seaforths, Gordons, Black Watch, and Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders. Major the Honourable Robert White directed the sports with greater success than had attended anything of the kind among our troops on this side of Natal.
The soldiers still filed into our bare and dirty quarters asking for the paper, and one of them complained that it was not sent out to his camp, and that he had to come in and get it.
"Canadian, aren't you?" Mr. Kipling asked, "from out on the wheat belt?"
"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.