If anything could have stirred that just and honest nature to unholy thoughts of vengeance it would have been the murder of these children; and I doubt not that he will hit the harder and the more relentlessly when he gets at close quarters with his enemy, fired by the thought of those mangled little bodies and the remembrance of their mothers' agony.

And in addition to the murderous shells of the Boers, typhoid and malaria were at their fell work in the women's laager; the children's graveyard just outside the laager extended its sad bounds week by week, and the cheerfulness that marked the beginning of the siege died in men's hearts.
[Illustration: Goal-Keeper By permission of the "Daily Graphic."] The cheerfulness, but not the determination.

Baden-Powell wrote home in December, after some two months of the siege, saying that they were all a little tired of it, but just as determined as ever never to submit.

And in order to keep up the spirits of the garrison in the hour when it seemed to many Englishmen that Mafeking was to be another Khartoum and he a second Gordon, Baden-Powell began to plan all manner of entertainments for the amusement of the women and children.
The special correspondent of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in Mafeking, who sent to his journal some of the most interesting letters received during the siege, bore witness to Baden-Powell's efforts in this direction.

In one of his letters he said: "The Colonel does all in his power to keep up the spirits of the people.