“Will the queen not listen to me, supposing I should reach her?” I replied, “I believe she would listen, but the difficulty is to get to her.”  “Well, I shall reach her,” expressed his final determination.  Others explained the difficulties more fully, but nothing could shake his resolution.  When he reached Bloemfontein he found the English army just returning from a battle with the Basutos, in which both parties claimed the victory, and both were glad that a second engagement was not tried.  Our officers invited Sechele to dine with them, heard his story, and collected a handsome sum of money to enable him to pursue his journey to England.  The commander refrained from noticing him, as a single word in favor of the restoration of the children of Sechele would have been a virtual confession of the failure of his own policy at the very outset.  Sechele proceeded as far as the Cape; but his resources being there expended, he was obliged to return to his own country, one thousand miles distant, without accomplishing the object of his journey.

On his return he adopted a mode of punishment which he had seen in the colony, namely, making criminals work on the public roads.  And he has since, I am informed, made himself the missionary to his own people.  He is tall, rather corpulent, and has more of the negro feature than common, but has large eyes.  He is very dark, and his people swear by “Black Sechele”.  He has great intelligence, reads well, and is a fluent speaker.  Great numbers of the tribes formerly living under the Boers have taken refuge under his sway, and he is now greater in power than he was before the attack on Kolobeng.

Having parted with Sechele, we skirted along the Kalahari Desert, and sometimes within its borders, giving the Boers a wide berth.  A larger fall of rain than usual had occurred in 1852, and that was the completion of a cycle of eleven or twelve years, at which the same phenomenon is reported to have happened on three occasions.  An unusually large crop of melons had appeared in consequence.  We had the pleasure of meeting with Mr. J. Macabe returning from Lake Ngami, which he had succeeded in reaching by going right across the Desert from a point a little to the south of Kolobeng.  The accounts of the abundance of watermelons were amply confirmed by this energetic traveler; for, having these in vast quantities, his cattle subsisted on the fluid contained in them for a period of no less than twenty-one days; and when at last they reached a supply of water, they did not seem to care much about it.  Coming to the lake from the southeast, he crossed the Teoughe, and went round the northern part of it, and is the only European traveler who had actually seen it all.  His estimate of the extent of the lake is higher than that given by Mr. Oswell and myself, or from about ninety to one hundred miles in circumference.  Before the lake was discovered, Macabe wrote a letter in one of the Cape papers recommending a certain route as likely