s, with a good garden surrounded by reeds. About thirty
English and a few Hottentots clustered around, and some three thousand
Zulus, refugees from Dingarn's cruelty, who showed themselves ready and
willing to work for hire, but who exposed their masters to the danger of
the king coming after them with fire and assagai. Hitherto on such an
alarm the whole settlement had been wont to take to the woods, but their
numbers were so increasing that they were beginning to erect a stockade
and think of defence.

To this little germ of a colony, Allen Gardiner brought the first
recollection of Christian faith and duty. On Sunday mornings he stood
under a tree, as he had been wont to do on the deck of his ship, and read
the Church Service in English to such as would come round him and be
reminded of their homes; in the afternoon, by the help of his
interpreter, he prayed with and for the Kaffirs, and expounded the truths
of the Gospel; and in the week, he kept school for such Kaffir children
as he could collect, dressing them decently in printed calico. He began
with very few, partly because many parents fancied he would steal and
make slaves of them, and partly because he wished to train a few to be in
advance and act as monitors to the rest. The English were on very good
terms with him, and allotted a piece of land for a missionary settlement,
which he called Berea, and began to build upon it in the fashion of the
country.

Fresh threats from Dingarn led the settlers to try to come to a treaty
with him, by which he was to leave them unmolested with all their
Kaffirs, on their undertaking to harbour no more of his deserters. There
was something hard in this, considering the horrid barbarities from which
the deserters fled, and the impossibility of carrying out the agreement,
as no one could undertake to watch the Tugela; but Captain Gardiner,
always eager and hasty, thinking that he should thus secure safety for
the colony and opportunities for the mission, undertook the embassy, and
set forth in a waggon with two Zulus and Cyrus, falling in on the way
with one of the grotesque parties of European hunters, who were wont to
go on expeditions after the elephant, hippopotamus, and buffalo, with a
hunting train of Hottentots and Kaffirs in their company. On whose
aspect he remarks truly:--

"I've seen the savage in his wildest mood,
And marked him reeked with human blood,
But never so repulsive made.
Someth