them had ever set eyes on the Queen, and he could
not imagine how it was possible that a great chieftainess should not be
seen by her people. We satisfied his curiosity by giving full details of
the times, places, and manner in which the British sovereign receives
her subjects, and he went away, declaring himself convinced and more
loyal than ever. The second visitor was a lady who had come to attend
church. She is the senior wife of a chief named Thekho, a son of
Moshesh. She impressed us as a person of great force of character and
great conversational gifts, was dressed in a fashionable hat and an
enormous black velvet mantle, and plied us with numerous questions
regarding the Queen, her family, and her government. She lives on the
hill among her dependents, exerts great influence, and has done good
service in resisting the reactionary tendencies of her brother-in-law
Masupha, a dogged and turbulent old pagan.

The mission station lies at the foot of the hill of Thaba Bosiyo, in a
singular region where crags of white or grey sandstone, detached from
the main mass of the tabular hills, stand up in solitary shafts and
pinnacles, and give a weird, uncanny look to the landscape. The soil is
fertile and well cultivated, but being alluvial, it is intersected in
all directions by the channels of streams, which have dug so deep into
it that much good land is every year lost by the mischief the streams
work when in flood. The sides of these channels are usually vertical,
and often eight, ten, or even twelve feet high, so that they offer a
serious obstacle to travellers either by waggon or on horseback. The
hill itself is so peculiar in structure, and has played such a part in
history, as to deserve some words of description. It is nearly two miles
long and less than a mile across, elliptical in form, rising about five
hundred feet above its base, and breaking down on every side in a line
of cliffs, which, on the north-west and north side (toward the mission
station), are from twenty to forty feet high. On the other side, which I
could not so carefully examine, they are apparently higher. These cliffs
are so continuous all round as to leave--so one is told--only three
spots in the circumference where they can be climbed; and although I
noticed one or two other places where a nimble cragsman might make his
way up, it is at those three points only that an attack by a number of
men could possibly be made. The easiest point is wher