The President has just ordered that one of the big siege-guns shall be sent to Cronje.'"[10] [Footnote 10: _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, May, 1900, p.

827.] Time {p.123} apparently was of no account.

The burghers and the Boers had only to wait open-mouthed for plums to drop--at Mafeking, at Kimberley, at Ladysmith.

Mafeking very possibly was not in itself worth the lives of fifty burghers; but it was worth a great deal more if it was to be the means of detaining them before its little worth to their exclusion from action concentrated elsewhere, which their numbers would have gone to make overpowering, and which by proper direction would have been decisive--not perhaps of ultimate issues--but of those prolonged delays in which lies the best hope of a defence.

It is an interesting commentary on Kruger's decision that, at the moment these lines are writing, the deliverance of Mafeking is known to have been preceded immediately by a fruitless assault of the burghers, which cost more than that presumed for the attack at the outset, which a competent general on the spot believed then would be successful.