ered about, up and down the slopes of the hill. Though there are
plenty of streams in Basutoland, there is hardly any swampy ground, and
consequently little or no fever, so the missionaries invalided from the
Zambesi frequently come here to recruit. The station of Morija has been
for many years past directed by French-Swiss pastors, but the schools
have been under the charge of Scottish Presbyterian clergymen, of course
in the service of the Paris Society, and they gave us a hearty welcome.
They have large and flourishing schools, from which a considerable
number of young Kafirs go out every year among their countrymen and
become an effective civilizing influence. There is among the Bantu
tribes so little religion, in the European sense of the word, that the
natives seem never to have felt the impulse to persecute, and hardly
ever to obstruct the preaching of Christianity. When opposition comes,
it comes from the witch-doctor or medicine-man, who feels his craft in
danger, seldom from the chief. Here most of the leading men have been
and still are on good terms with the missionaries. The Paramount Chief
of the whole country lives three miles from Morija, at Matsieng, where
he has established, as the wont of the Kafirs is, a new kraal on the top
of a breezy hill, forsaking the residence of his father in the valley
beneath. Here we visited him.

Lerothodi, the Paramount Chief, is the son of Letsie and grandson of
Moshesh, and now ranks with Khama as the most important native potentate
south of the Zambesi. He is a strong, thickset man, who looks about
fifty years of age, and is not wanting either in intelligence or in
firmness. He was dressed in a grey shooting-coat and trousers of grey
cloth, with a neat new black, low-crowned hat, and received the Deputy
Acting Commissioner and ourselves in a stone house which he has recently
built as a sort of council-chamber and reception-room for white
visitors. Hard by, another house, also of stone, was being erected to
lodge such visitors, and over its doorway a native sculptor had carved
the figure of a crocodile, the totem of the Basutos. When a chief sits
to administer justice among the tribesmen, as he does on most mornings,
he always sits in the open air, a little way from his sleeping-huts. We
found a crowd of natives gathered at the levee, whom Lerothodi quitted
to lead us into the reception-room. He was accompanied by six or seven
magnates and counsellors,--one of the most t