THE PARTNERS MEET England was more stunned than shocked.

The dark significance, the evil consequences destined to flow from the Jameson Raid had not yet reached the general mind.

There was something gallant and romantic in this wild invasion: a few hundred men, with no commissariat and insufficient clothing, with enough ammunition and guns for only the merest flurry of battle, doing this unbelievable gamble with Fate--challenging a republic of fighting men with well-stocked arsenals and capable artillery, with ample sources of supply, with command of railways and communications.

It was certainly magnificent; but it was magnificent folly.
It did not take England long to decide that point; and not even the Laureate's paean in the organ of the aristocracy and upper middle class could evoke any outburst of feeling.

There was plenty of admiration for the pluck and boldness, for the careless indifference with which the raiders risked their lives; for the romantic side of the dash from Pitsani to the Rand; but the thing was so palpably impossible, as it was carried out, that there was not a knowing mind in the Islands which would not have echoed Rhodes' words, "Jameson has upset the apple-cart." Rudyard Byng did not visit Jasmine the next evening at six o'clock.