- gersfontein, and was staying in the house of
friends. There was one little boy in the family named after Prof. Henry Drummond. I had been in the library all the afternoon, the very room in which Sir James Simpson discovered chloroform, and then had gone into the drawing-room for afternoon tea. The boy and his governess were the only other members of the household who came down. He and I fell to talking about the war. I asked him: "What do you think about the war in South Africa?"
"Well," he said, "I did not think much about it at the beginning; I did not think about it much until a friend of mine was killed."
"Yes," I said, "who was the friend?"
"General Wauchope."
He was, as you know, the commander of the Black Watch, and the Black Watch had been recruited from Edinburgh. The boy told me about the regiment and its fate, and shortly after his story was filled up by an Oxford man who had been in Edinburgh when the tidings of the battle came. He said every shop was closed, and along the streets little knots of men were gathered, and you could see the sobbing of strong men everywhere. There was scarcely a great family in Edinburgh that had not been touched. And yet, at the same time, all through the city there was a subdued sense of moral elevation, as though something had lifted the
