rds which you have checked, Mr. Wilmot,
but I will proceed, or dinner will be announced before I have finished
this portion of my history."

"The course adopted by Mokanna under these circumstances was such as
will raise him much higher in your estimation. As he found that his
countrymen were to be massacred until he and the other chiefs were
delivered up, dead or alive, he resolved to surrender himself as a
hostage for his country. He sent a message to say that he would do so,
and the next day, with a calm magnanimity that would have done honor to
a Roman patriot, he came, unattended, to the English camp. His words
were 'People say that I have occasioned this war: let me see if my
delivering myself up will restore peace to my country.' The commanding
officer, to whom he surrendered himself, immediately forwarded him as a
prisoner to the colony."

"What became of him?"

"Of that hereafter; but I wish here to give you the substance of a
speech made by one of Mokanna's head men, who came after Mokanna's
surrender into the English camp. I am told that the imperfect notes
taken of it afford but a very faint idea of its eloquence; at all
events, the speech gives a very correct view of the treatment which the
Caffres received from our hands.

"'This war,' said he, 'British chiefs, is an unjust one, for you are
trying to extirpate a people whom you have forced to take up arms. When
our fathers and the fathers of the boors first settled on the Zurweld,
they dwelt together in peace. Their flocks grazed the same hills, their
herdsmen smoked out of the same pipe; they were brothers until the herds
of the Amakosa (Caffres) increased so much as to make the hearts of the
Dutch boors sore. What those covetous men could not get from our fathers
for old buttons, they took by force. Our fathers were men; they loved
their cattle; their wives and children lived upon milk; they fought for
their property; they began to hate the colonists, who coveted their all,
and aimed at their destruction.

"'Now their kraals and our fathers' kraals were separate. The boors made
commandoes for our fathers; our fathers drove them out of the Zurweld,
and we dwelt there because we had conquered it; there we married wives;
there our children were born; the white men hated us, but could not
drive us away; when there was war, we plundered you; when there was
peace, some of our bad people stole; but our chiefs forbade it.

"'We lived in peace; some bad pe