to lead to it.  The Transvaal Boers fined him 500 dollars for writing about “ouze felt”, Our country, and imprisoned him, too, till the fine was paid.  I now learned from his own lips that the public report of this is true.  Mr. Macabe’s companion, Mahar, was mistaken by a tribe of Barolongs for a Boer, and shot as he approached their village.  When Macabe came up and explained that he was an Englishman, they expressed the utmost regret, and helped to bury him.  This was the first case in recent times of an Englishman being slain by the Bechuanas.  We afterward heard that there had been some fighting between these Barolongs and the Boers, and that there had been capturing of cattle on both sides.  If this was true, I can only say that it was the first time that I ever heard of cattle being taken by Bechuanas.  This was a Caffre war in stage the second; the third stage in the development is when both sides are equally well armed and afraid of each other; the fourth, when the English take up a quarrel not their own, and the Boers slip out of the fray.

Two other English gentlemen crossed and recrossed the Desert about the same time, and nearly in the same direction.  On returning, one of them, Captain Shelley, while riding forward on horseback, lost himself, and was obliged to find his way alone to Kuruman, some hundreds of miles distant.  Reaching that station shirtless, and as brown as a Griqua, he was taken for one by Mrs. Moffat, and was received by her with a salutation in Dutch, that being the language spoken by this people.  His sufferings must have been far more severe than any we endured.  The result of the exertions of both Shelley and Macabe is to prove that the general view of the Desert always given by the natives has been substantially correct.

Occasionally, during the very dry seasons which succeed our winter and precede our rains, a hot wind blows over the Desert from north to south.  It feels somewhat as if it came from an oven, and seldom blows longer at a time than three days.  It resembles in its effects the harmattan of the north of Africa, and at the time the missionaries first settled in the country, thirty-five years ago, it came loaded with fine reddish-colored sand.  Though no longer accompanied by sand, it is so devoid of moisture as to cause the wood of the best seasoned English boxes and furniture to shrink, so that every wooden article not made in the country is warped.  The verls of ramrods made in England are loosened, and on returning to Europe fasten again.  This wind is in such an electric state that a bunch of ostrich feathers held a few seconds against it becomes as strongly charged as if attached to a powerful electrical machine, and clasps the advancing hand with a sharp crackling sound.