ants get their moisture?  Our house was built on a hard ferruginous conglomerate, in order to be out of the way of the white ant, but they came in despite the precaution; and not only were they, in this sultry weather, able individually to moisten soil to the consistency of mortar for the formation of galleries, which, in their way of working, is done by night (so that they are screened from the observation of birds by day in passing and repassing toward any vegetable matter they may wish to devour), but, when their inner chambers were laid open, these were also surprisingly humid.  Yet there was no dew, and, the house being placed on a rock, they could have no subterranean passage to the bed of the river, which ran about three hundred yards below the hill.  Can it be that they have the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?*

   * When we come to Angola, I shall describe an insect there
   which distills several pints of water every night.

Rain, however, would not fall.  The Bakwains believed that I had bound Sechele with some magic spell, and I received deputations, in the evenings, of the old counselors, entreating me to allow him to make only a few showers:  “The corn will die if you refuse, and we shall become scattered.  Only let him make rain this once, and we shall all, men, women, and children, come to the school, and sing and pray as long as you please.”  It was in vain to protest that I wished Sechele to act just according to his own ideas of what was right, as he found the law laid down in the Bible, and it was distressing to appear hard-hearted to them.  The clouds often collected promisingly over us, and rolling thunder seemed to portend refreshing showers, but next morning the sun would rise in a clear, cloudless sky; indeed, even these lowering appearances were less frequent by far than days of sunshine are in London.

The natives, finding it irksome to sit and wait helplessly until God gives them rain from heaven, entertain the more comfortable idea that they can help themselves by a variety of preparations, such as charcoal made of burned bats, inspissated renal deposit of the mountain cony—­’Hyrax capensis’—­(which, by the way, is used, in the form of pills, as a good antispasmodic, under the name of “stone-sweat"*), the internal parts of different animals—­as jackals’ livers, baboons’ and lions’ hearts, and hairy calculi from the bowels of old cows—­serpents’ skins and vertebrae, and every kind of tuber, bulb, root, and plant to be found in the country.  Although you disbelieve their efficacy in charming the clouds to pour out their refreshing treasures, yet, conscious that civility is useful every where, you kindly state that you think they are mistaken as to their power.  The rain-doctor selects a particular bulbous root, pounds it, and administers a cold infusion to a sheep, which in five minutes afterward expires in convulsions.  Part of the same bulb is converted into smoke, and ascends toward the sky; rain follows in a day or two.  The inference is obvious.  Were we as much harassed by droughts, the logic would be irresistible in England in 1857.