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APRIL 7, 1900.

READINGS FROM NEW BOOKS.

IN LADYSMITH DURING THE SIEGE.*

Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing. At first to be besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is nothing but a weary, weary bore. We can do nothing but eat, and drink and sleep-just exist dismally. We have forgotten when the siege began; and now we are beginning not to care when it ends.

For my part I feel it will never end. It will go on just as now, languid fighting, languid cessation, forever and forever. We shall drop off one by one and listlessly die of old age.

And in the year 2099 the New Zealander antiquarian, digging among the buried cities of Natal, will come upon the forgotten town of Ladysmith, and he will find a handful of Rip Van Winkle Boers, with white beards down to their knees, behind quaint, antique guns shelling a cactus-grown ruin. Inside, sheltering in holes, he will find a few decrepit creatures, very, very old, the children born during the bombardment. He will take these links with the past home to New Zealand. But they will be afraid at the silence and security of peace. Having never known anything but bombardment, they will die of terror without it.

So be it. I shall not be there to see. But I shall wrap these lines up in a Red Cross flag and bury them among the ruins of Mulberry Grove, that, after

From From Capetown to Ladysmith. By G. W. Steevens. Copyright, 1900, by Dodd, Mead & Co. Price, $1.25.

the excavations, the unnumbered readers of the Daily Mail may, in the enlightened year 2100, know what a siege and a bombardment were like.

Sometimes I think the siege would be just as bad without the bombardment. In some ways it would be even worse; for the bombardment is something to notice and talk of, albeit languidly. But the siege is an unredeemed curse. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy, to be besieged or besieger was the natural lot of man; to give ten years at a stretch to it was all in a life's work; there was nothing else to do. In the days when a great victory was gained one year, and a fast frigate arrived with the news the next, a man still had leisure in his life for a year's siege now and again.

But to the man of 1899-or, by'r Lady, inclining to 1900-with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousand-fold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news-news that concerns us nothing.

And here we are with the enemy all round us, splashing melinite among us in most hours of the day, and for the best part of a month we have not even had any definite news about the men for whom we must wait to get out of it. We wait and wonder-first expectant, presently apathetic, and feel ourselves grow old.

Furthermore, we are in prison. We know now what Dartmoor feels like.

The practised vagabond tires in a fortnight of a European capital; of Ladysmith he sickens in three hours.

Even when we could ride out ten or a dozen miles into the country, there was little that was new, nothing that was interesting. Now we lie at the bottom of the saucer and stare up at the pitiless ring of hills that bark death. Always the same stiff, naked ridges, flat capped with our intrenchments-always, always the same. As morning hardens to the brutal clearness of South African mid-day, they march in on you till Bulwan seems to tower over your very heads. There it is close over you, shady and of wide prospect; and if you try to go up you are a dead man.

Beyond is the world-war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds dear in a little island under the North Star. But you sit here to be idly shot at. You are of it, but not in it-clean out of the world. To your world and to yourself, you are every bit as good as dead-except that dead men have no time to fill in.

I know now how a monk without a vocation feels. I know how a fly in a beer-bottle feels. I know how it tastes,

too.

And with it all there is the melinite and the shrapnel. To be sure they give us the only pinprick of interest to be had in Ladysmith. It is something novel to live in this town turned inside out.

Where people should be the long, long day from dawn to daylight shows only a dead blank.

Where business should be, the sleepy shop-blinds droop. But waere no business should be-along the crumbling ruts that lead no whither-clatter wagon after wagon, with curling whip lashes and piles of bread and hay.

Where no people should be in the clefts at the river bank, in bald patches of veldt ringed with rocks, in over

grown ditches-all these you find alive with men and beasts.

The place that a month ago was only fit to pitch empty meat-tins into is now priceless stable-room; two squadrons of troop horse pack flank to flank with its shelves. A scrub-entangled hole, which, perhaps, nobody save runaway Kaffirs ever set foot in before, is now the envied habitation of the balloon. The most worthless rock-heap below a perpendicular slope is now the choicest of town lots.

The whole centre of gravity of Ladysmith is changed. Its belly lies no longer in the multifarious emporia along the High Street, but in the earthreddened, half-invisible tents that bashfully mark the commissariat stores. Its brain is not the Town Hall, the best target in Ladysmith, but headquarters under the stone-packed hill. The riddled Royal Hotel is its social centre no longer; it is to the trench-seamed Sailor's Camp or the wind-swept shoulders of Cæsar's camp that men go to hear and tell the news. Poor Ladysmith! Deserted in its markets, repeopled in its wastes; here ripped with iron splinters, there rising again into rail-roofed, rock-walled caves; trampled down in its gardens, manured where nothing can ever grow; skirts hemmed with sandbags and bowels bored with tunnels; the Boers may not have hurt us, but they have left their mark for years on her.

They have not hurt us much-and yet, the casualties mount up. Three today, two yesterday, four dead or dying, and seven wounded with one shellthey are nothing at all, but they mount up. I suppose we stand at about fifty now, and there will be more before we are done with it.

And then there are moments when even this dribbling bombardment can be appalling.

I happened into the centre of the town one day when the two big guns

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Then the tearing scream; horror! it was coming from Bulwan. Again the annihilating blast, and not ten yards away. A roof gaped, and a house leaped to pieces. A black reeled over, then terror plucked him up again, and sent him running.

Head down, hands over ears, they tore down the street, and from the other side swooped down the implacable, irresistible next.

You come out of the dust and the stench of melinite, not knowing where you are, hardly knowing whether you were hit-only knowing that the next was rushing on its way. No eyes to see it, no limbs to escape, no bulwark to protect, no army to avenge. You squirm between iron fingers. Nothing to do but endure.

THE BUNCH OF YELLOW ROSES.*

"I always feared something would happen to Mary," Mrs. Myrover said. "It seemed unnatural for her to be wearing herself out teaching little negroes who ought to have been working for her. But the world has hardly been a fit place to live in since the war, and when I follow her, as I must before long, I shall not be sorry to go."

She gave strict orders that no colored person should be admitted to the house. Some of her friends heard of this, and remonstrated. They knew the teacher was loved by the pupils, and felt that sincere respect from the humble would be a worthy tribute to the proudest. But Mrs. Myrover was obdurate.

"They had my daughter when she was alive," she said, "and they've killed her. But she's mine now, and I won't

*From The Wife of His Youth. By Charles W. Chesnutt. Copyright, 1899, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, $1.50.

have them come near her. I don't want one of them at the funeral or anywhere round."

For a month before Miss Myrover's death Sophy had been watching her rosebush-the one that bore the yellow roses-for the first buds of spring, and when these had appeared, had awaited impatiently their gradual unfolding. but not until her teacher's death had they become full-blown roses. When Miss Myrover died, Sophy determined to pluck the roses and lay them on her coffin. Perhaps, she thought, they might even put them in her hand or on her breast. For Sophy remembered Miss Myrover's thanks and praise when she brought her the yellow roses the spring before.

On the morning of the day set for the funeral, Sophy washed her face till it shone, combed and brushed her hair with painful conscientiousness, put on

her best frock, plucked her yellow roses, and, tying them with the treasured ribbon her teacher had given her, set out for Miss Myrover's home.

She went round to the side gate-the house stood on a corner-and stole up the path to the kitchen. A colored

woman, whom she did not know, came to the door.

"Wat yer want, chile?" she inquired. "Kin I see Miss Ma'y?" asked Sophy, timidly.

"I don't know, honey. Ole Miss Myrover say she don't want no cullud folks roun' de house endyoin' dis fun'al. I'll look an' see if she's roun' de front room whar de co'pse is. You set down heah an' keep still, an' ef she's upstairs maybe I kin git yer in dere a minute. Ef I can't I kin put yer bokay 'mongs' de res', whar she won't know nuthin' erbout it."

A moment after she had gone, there was a step in the hall, and old Mrs. Myrover came into the kitchen.

"Dinah!" she said, in a peevish tone; "Dinah!"

Receiving no answer, Mrs. Myrover peered round the kitchen, and caught sight of Sophy.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

"I-I'm-m waiting to see the cook, ma'am," stammered Sophy.

"The cook isn't here now. I don't know where she is. Besides, my daughter is to be buried to-day, and I won't have any one visiting the servants until the funeral is over. Come back some other day, or see the cook at her own home in the evening."

She stood waiting for the child to go, and under the keen glance of her eyes Sophy, feeling as though she had been caught in some disgraceful act, hurried down the walk, and out of the gate, with her bouquet in her hand.

"Dinah," said Mrs. Myrover, when the cook came back, "I don't want any strange people admitted here to-day.

The house will be full of our friends, and we have no room for others."

"Yas'm," said the cook. She understood perfectly what her mistress meant; and what the cook thought about her mistress was a matter of no consequence.

The funeral services were held in St. Paul's Episcopal Church, where the Myrovers had always worshipped. Quite a number of Miss Myrover's pupils went to the church to attend the services. The building was not a large one. There was a small gallery in at the rear, to which colored people were admitted, if they chose to come at ordinary services; and those who wished to be present at the funeral supposed that the usual custom would prevail. They were therefore surprised, when they went to the side entrance, by which colored people gained access to the gallery stairs, to be met by an usher who barred their passage.

"I'm sorry," he said, "but I have had orders to admit no one until the friends of the family have all been seated. If you wish to wait until the white people have all gone in, and there's any room left, you may be able to get into the back part of the gallery. Of course I can't tell you whether there'll be any room or not."

Now the statement of the usher was a very reasonable one, but, strange to say, none of the colored people chose to remain except Sophy. She still hoped to use her floral offering for its destined end, in some way, though she did not know just how. She waited in the yard until the church was filled with white people, and a number who could not gain admittance were standing about the doors. Then she went round to the side of the church, and, depositing her bouquet carefully on an old mossy gravestone, climbed up on the projecting sill of a window near the chancel. The window was of stained glass of somewhat ancient make. The

church was old, had indeed been built in colonial times, and the stained glass had been brought from England. The design of the window showed Jesus blessing little children. Time had dealt gently with the window, but just at the feet of the figure of Jesus a small triangular piece of glass had been broken out. To this aperture Sophy applied her eyes, and through it saw and heard what she could of the services within.

Before the chancel, on trestles draped in black, stood the sombre casket in which lay all that was mortal of her dear teacher. The top of the casket was covered with flowers, and lying stretched out underneath it she saw Miss Myrover's little, white dog, Prince. He had followed the body to the church, and, slipping in unnoticed among the mourners, had taken his place, from which no one had the heart to remove him.

The white-robed rector read the solemn service for the dead, and then delivered a brief address, in which he dwelt upon the uncertainty of life, and, to the believer, the certain blessedness of eternity. He spoke of Miss Myrover's kindly spirit, and, as an illustration of her love and self-sacrifice for others, referred to her labors as a teacher of the poor ignorant negroes, who had been placed in their midst by an all-wise Providence, and whom it was their duty to guide and direct in the station in which God had put them. Then the organ pealed, a prayer was said, and the long cortége moved from the church to the cemetery, about half a mile away, where the body was to be interred.

When the services were over, Sophy sprang down from her perch, and, taking her flowers, followed the procession. She did not walk with the rest, but at a proper and respectful distance from the last mourner. No one noticed the little black girl with the bunch of yelLIVING AGE.

VOL. VII. 348

low flowers, or thought of her as interested in the funeral.

The cortége reached the cemetery and filed slowly through the gate; but Sophy stood outside, looking at a small sign in white letters on a black background:

"Notice. This cemetery is for white people only. Others please keep out."

Sophy, thanks to Miss Myrover's painstaking instruction, could read this sign very distinctly. In fact she had often read it before. For Sophy was a child who loved beauty in a blind, groping sort of way, and had sometimes stood by the fence of the cemetery and looked through at the green mounds and shaded walks, and blooming flowers within, and wished that she might walk among them. She knew, too, that the little sign on the gate, though so courteously worded, was no mere formality; for she had heard how a colored man, who had wandered into the cemetery on a hot night and fallen asleep on the flat top of a tomb, had been arrested as a vagrant and fined five dollars, which he had worked out on the streets, with a ball-and-chain attachment, at twenty-five cents a day. Since that time the cemetery gate had been locked at night.

So Sophy stayed outside and looked through the fence. Her poor bouquet had begun to droop by this time, and the yellow ribbon had lost some of its freshness. Sophy could see the rector standing by the grave, the mourners gathered round; she could faintly distinguish the solemn words with which ashes were committed to ashes, and dust to dust. She heard the hollow thud of the earth falling on the coffin; she leaned against the iron fence, sobbing softly, until the grave was filled and rounded off, and the wreaths and other floral pieces were disposed about it. When the mourners began to move toward the gate, Sophy walked slowly down the street, in a direction opposite

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