Raped on the Railway

IN THE TRANSVAAL

After Maud's funeral the house seemed so dull and melancholy that Brandon hastened to sell off all the furniture. Life had become distasteful to him. He was alone in the world and had lost all interest in mundane affairs. He felt that if this continued he would be driven to suicide, and he had the sense to know that the only means to drive away these black thoughts was a thorough change of scene and surrounding.

He quickly got together all the money he could raise, and with three hundred pounds in his pocket started for Liverpool, resolved to take the first steamer — he neither knew nor cared whither.

He wandered round Liverpool docks, and seeing a large steamer about to start, asked whither it was bound, and learned that it was going to the Cape. He embarked, and reached Capetown without any incident or accident. In a few weeks he had nearly exhausted all his money, and was wondering what he should do next, when war between England and the Transvaal became almost certain.

His life still seemed dull and aimless, and though he had shaken off the suicidal thoughts he cared little to live, and it seemed to him that if some Boer's bullet should lay him low it would cause no grief to anyone, and be an honourable end to his own misery.

He lost no time in enlisting in one of the Cape regiments, and as he was a man of education, and had been a volunteer in England and knew something of soldiering he was quickly promoted to be sergeant.

In a few weeks war was declared, and it was with the utmost satisfaction that Brandon heard that his battalion was ordered to the front to join the forces under General Symons.

The officers of the Queen's troops found out quickly that he was a gentleman, and many of them had heard of him by reputation as an artist, so he soon became a general favourite amongst them, and more especially with a tall young, delicate looking man whose name was Captain Sinclair, and they used frequently to visit each other's tents.

Brandon soon discovered from his conversation and demeanour, that the Captain was no ordinary man. Of superior education, he was a profound thinker and had not Destiny made him a soldier it is clear that Nature would have turned him out a philosopher. Their talk was always of an intellectual kind and Brandon felt that he had met a man worth listening to on the rare occasions that his friend could be made to “let himself go,” as he termed it. Once, when speaking of the marvellous power of the genital instinct, and of the magnetic influence that Woman exerted over Man, the Captain narrated the following remarkable dream, which struck Brandon so much that he made notes of it the same night on getting back to his own tent.

We give it as it was repeated to us.