In little over a week we shall have to begin killing our horses because they will have nothing to eat.
_January 26, 1900._ Full of hopes and fears, I rode early up to Observation Hill as usual, and saw at once that the Boer waggon-laagers, which I watched departing yesterday, had returned in the night.

Perhaps there were not quite so many waggons, and the site had been shifted a few hundred yards.

But still there they stood again.

Their presence is not hopeful, but it does not imply disaster.

They may have gone in haste, and been recalled at leisure.