“ During the long, dark night, while I the little band was waiting for reinforcements, Burnham crept stealthily forward in the bush, smelling out the Kaffirs, for he could scent them as a dog does, and getting so close to them that he could touch them as they passed. At daybreak he tracked again, and met his fellow scout Ingram, who had brought Captain Borrow and his twenty men – only to join in the others in destruction. When Wilson prepared to make his last heroic stand, Burnham, Ingram, and a man named Gooding were dispatched as a forlorn hope to rush through to the main column. ”

“ Lively and energetic, and with free yet courteous 'manners, lie is able to spin the most thrilling of yarns, and to narrate the most blood-curdling adventures, but, although marvelously well-informed, in spite of his long absences from civilization, and able to say something interesting on almost every topic of conversation, he is reserved and modest, and prefers to he a listener rather than a talker. ”

“ He is one of those wonderful scouts who might have stepped straight from the pages of Maine Reid of Fenimore Copper. Fiction has produced no character who could follow up a scent or track a spoor more keenly, than Burnham. He comes of a 'generation of scouts. His father and grandfather before him were scouts, and the scouting instinct seems hereditary in his family. He has it tracked red Indians in the Wild West until he can follow a trail with the best or worst of them. Nature seems to him an open bock on which lie can read every imprint made by man. ”