For some days after recovering from fever I was unable to walk to school, and I got Katunga, a big chief who came in to tell us about Doto Livisto (Dr. Livingstone), to point out the names of common objects as mountain, tree, &c. He laughed very heartily at my imitation of his words. In beginning to form a vocabulary, I took a Dictionary and went over it day after day with the interpreters, noting down all the native words I could find. I also wrote a translation of several passages of Scripture from their lips. But I found they often had difficulties. When I wished to translate the “Hail master” of Judas, they said that there was no word for “Hail,” but (referring to English salutations recently introduced) they assured me I would make nothing of it unless I said “Morning Master”. The “kissed him” was a similar puzzle. For _kiss_ they gave me one word which, as I afterwards discovered, meant _to bite_, and another which meant to _smell_! They could come no nearer the idea. No mother here kisses her child. One has only to look at the photograph of a native female to see that she cannot kiss. Notwithstanding their residence at Cape Town these men were often unable to translate the most ordinary English into their own tongue, and yet they were better interpreters than any we could expect to train for several years. When I once tried hard to find a word for _guilty_, they could give nothing but the word _bad_. One gentleman said that they had occasionally been offenders in Cape Town. He was sure that if I followed the usual legal forms, and mentioned the sentence of working for a month at the docks, they had sufficient experience to tell me! But though I supposed cases as like this as I could without betraying the matter, I failed to get the information required. What I most deplored was that if these men had got the word in the middle of an address, it would have given them no trouble! From the translations I wrote down I afterwards formed a conception of how they would treat such an expression as, “His delight is in the Law of the Lord”. They would break it up into two sentences, of which the first would be “Light is low,” and the second some very unintelligible statement about God. I could not have believed that such nonsense was possible unless I had actually come into contact with it. The African interpreter who said, ‘The salvation of the soul is a great sack,’ is I fear quite an average specimen of his class. But this is due more to the difficulties of the English language than to any natural incapacity in the African. I have employed many to translate from one negro dialect to another and they could do this very well. The native congregations that listened to the interpreters must have been much puzzled at first. Once they heard an address on the healing of the leper—and every time the word ‘leper’ occurred it was rendered ‘leopard’.