the difficulties we had encountered, and how glad we were that they were all at an end by at last reaching his presence.  He signified his own joy, and added, “Your cattle are all bitten by the tsetse, and will certainly die; but never mind, I have oxen, and will give you as many as you need.”  We, in our ignorance, then thought that as so few tsetse had bitten them no great mischief would follow.  He then presented us with an ox and a jar of honey as food, and handed us over to the care of Mahale, who had headed the party to Kolobeng, and would now fain appropriate to himself the whole credit of our coming.  Prepared skins of oxen, as soft as cloth, were given to cover us through the night; and, as nothing could be returned to this chief, Mahale became the owner of them.  Long before it was day Sebituane came, and sitting down by the fire, which was lighted for our benefit behind the hedge where we lay, he narrated the difficulties he had himself experienced, when a young man, in crossing that same desert which we had mastered long afterward.  As he has been most remarkable in his career, and was unquestionably the greatest man in all that country, a short sketch of his life may prove interesting to the reader.

Sebituane was about forty-five years of age; of a tall and wiry form, an olive or coffee-and-milk color, and slightly bald; in manner cool and collected, and more frank in his answers than any other chief I ever met.  He was the greatest warrior ever heard of beyond the colony; for, unlike Mosilikatse, Dingaan, and others, he always led his men into battle himself.  When he saw the enemy, he felt the edge of his battle-axe, and said, “Aha! it is sharp, and whoever turns his back on the enemy will feel its edge.”  So fleet of foot was he, that all his people knew there was no escape for the coward, as any such would be cut down without mercy.  In some instances of skulking he allowed the individual to return home; then calling him, he would say, “Ah! you prefer dying at home to dying in the field, do you?  You shall have your desire.”  This was the signal for his immediate execution.

He came from the country near the sources of the Likwa and Namagari rivers in the south, so we met him eight hundred or nine hundred miles from his birth-place.  He was not the son of a chief, though related closely to the reigning family of the Basutu; and when, in an attack by Sikonyele, the tribe was driven out of one part, Sebituane was one in that immense horde of savages driven back by the Griquas from Kuruman in 1824.* He then fled to the north with an insignificant party of men and cattle.  At Melita the Bangwaketse collected the Bakwains, Bakatla, and Bahurutse, to “eat them up”.  Placing his men in front, and the women behind the cattle, he routed the whole of his enemies at one blow.  Having thus conquered Makabe, the chief of the Bangwaketse, he took immediate possession of his town and all his goods.

   * See an account of this affair in Moffat’s “Missionary
   Enterprise in Africa”.