TRIALS OF LOYALISTS.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 9162, 3 June 1901, Page 3

TRIALS OF LOYALISTS.

The Times lately printed a number of : extracts from a diary written between September and December last by an Englishwoman, the wife of a miller living m Ventersdorp. As that town has been more often alternately occupied and re-,/ occupied by British and Boers than perhaps any other m South Africa, the rer | cord gives a most curious picture of the ebb and -flow of war. One "month the , British troops give the writer a wounded 1 mare; when the animal is sound the Boers carry it off along with all the arms m the house. Then we have a picture of the writer saluting the "Tommies/ as , they march into Ventersdorp m the early morning by "waving a sheet out of the . bedroom window. In November she is an eye-witness from her own door, of three engagements m two days, the shells flying over the house "like a big rushing wind," and describes the disappointing of their hopes that the place might be garrisoned. Finally, at the end of December the English troops, with several generals, are once more m Ventersdorp, but the end of the war seemed then as far off as ever, and the writer concludes with a touching tribute to the memory of a gallant trooper m the Scots Imperial Yeomanry who nad riven her his badge to make an ornament for "Pom-Pom"— hei* baby. The simplicity and artlessness of the narrative only adds to the impressiveness of this picture of the trials of a loyalist household m the Transvaal.