toiled at their irksome tasks day after day, cleansing wounds, binding up rents which the lash had made, carrying the helpless men behind the cavalry, up and down the hills for twenty and twenty-five miles at a stretch, or attending to the sanitation of the camp.
It was a month of hard, self-sacrificing toil. Nor was it a light thing for these Indians to do this work. They were members of a sensitive and cultured race, with the elements of an ancient civilization going to make up their characters-men from whose fathers the world has received portions of its finest literature, and examples of its greatest thought. It was no trifle for such men to become voluntary nurses to men not yet emerged from the most degraded state. But distinctions of this kind are rarely appreciated in South Africa. Indians are coloured, and are accordingly classed with aboriginal natives. In the Transvaal, they are not allowed to ride in the trams, and there are special compartments for them in the trains. In our prisons "N" is stitched to their collars, to denote the people with whom they are classed, and in food—though the food is wholly unsuitable—in clothing, in work, in the cells, to all intents and purposes they are "natives."
One of the greatest difficulties during this
