The Times lately printed a number of extracts froin diary
Written between September and December last by an Englishwoman, the wife of a miller living in Yeutersdorp. AS that town has been, more often alternately occupied and reoccupied by British and. Boers than perhaps any other in South Africa, the record gives a most curious picture of the ebb and flow of war. One month the British troops give the writer a, wounded mare; when 'the animal is sound the Boers carry it off along with all the arms in the house. Then we have a picture of the writer saluting the " Tommies " as they march into Ventersdorp in the early morning by waving a sheet out of the hedroom window. In November she is an eye-witness, from her own door, of three engagements in two days, the shells flying over the house "like a big rushing wind," and describes the disappointing of their hopes that the place might be garrisoned. Finally, -at the end of December, the English' troops, with seven generals; are onee more in Ventersdorp, but the end of the war seemed then as far off as ever, and the writer concludes with a touching tribute to the ,memory of a gallant treoper in the Scots Imperial Yeomanry who had given her his badge to make an Ornament for "Pom-Pom "—her baby. The simplicity and artlessness of the narrative only adds to the impressiveness of .this picture of the trials of a loyalist household in the Transvaal.
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