THREE:They could afford to be generous now they were free, so they sent him long letters, carefully printed out, as he could not read running hand. They told him wonderful stories of camps and bivouacs, of skirmishes and snipings. They enlarged on the grilling fierceness of the December sun which had burnt their faces brick-red and peeled their noseson the flies which swarmed thicker by far than over Odiam middenon the awful dysentery that grabbed at half their palson the hypocritical Boers, who read the Bible and used dum-dum bullets.Boarzell Fair was in many ways a mark of the passage of the years and a commentary on history. Not only did the atmosphere and persons of it change very much[Pg 351] as the nineteenth century changed, but the side-shows were so many lights cast on popular opinion, politics, and progress.
