do so alone, we shall not be to blame.”  The declaration of Sechele, that he would follow where I led, produced the greatest consternation.  It is curious that in all their pretended dreams or visions of their god he has always a crooked leg, like the Egyptian Thau.  Supposing that those who were reported to have perished in this cave had fallen over some precipice, we went well provided with lights, ladder, lines, &c.; but it turned out to be only an open cave, with an entrance about ten feet square, which contracts into two water-worn branches, ending in round orifices through which the water once flowed.  The only inhabitants it seems ever to have had were baboons.  I left at the end of the upper branch one of Father Mathew’s leaden teetotal tickets.

I never saw the Bakwains looking so haggard and lean as at this time.  Most of their cattle had been swept away by the Boers, together with about eighty fine draught oxen; and much provision left with them by two officers, Captains Codrington and Webb, to serve for their return journey south, had been carried off also.  On their return these officers found the skeletons of the Bakwains where they expected to find their own goods.  All the corn, clothing, and furniture of the people, too, had been consumed in the flames which the Boers had forced the subject tribes to apply to the town during the fight, so that its inhabitants were now literally starving.

Sechele had given orders to his people not to commit any act of revenge pending his visit to the Queen of England; but some of the young men ventured to go to meet a party of Boers returning from hunting, and, as the Boers became terrified and ran off, they brought their wagons to Litubaruba.  This seems to have given the main body of Boers an idea that the Bakwains meant to begin a guerrilla war upon them.  This “Caffre war” was, however, only in embryo, and not near that stage of development in which the natives have found out that the hide-and-seek system is the most successful.

The Boers, in alarm, sent four of their number to ask for peace!  I, being present, heard the condition:  “Sechele’s children must be restored to him.”  I never saw men so completely and unconsciously in a trap as these four Boers were.  Strong parties of armed Bakwains occupied every pass in the hills and gorges around; and had they not promised much more than they intended, or did perform, that day would have been their last.  The commandant Scholz had appropriated the children of Sechele to be his own domestic slaves.  I was present when one little boy, Khari, son of Sechele, was returned to his mother; the child had been allowed to roll into the fire, and there were three large unbound open sores on different parts of his body.  His mother and the women received him with a flood of silent tears.

Slavery is said to be mild and tender-hearted in some places.  The Boers assert that they are the best of masters, and that, if the English had possessed the Hottentot slaves, they would have received much worse treatment than they did:  what that would have been it is difficult to imagine.  I took down the names of some scores of boys and girls, many of whom I knew as our scholars; but I could not comfort the weeping mothers by any hope of their ever returning from slavery.