As the day passed, and still no further tidings arrived of the approach of the Zulus or the destruction of Bishopstowe, the Bishop began to have strong suspicions that, after all, he had been right in his original opinion, and that “the killing, burning, and destroying” had been conjured up by some excited imagination. This opinion was confirmed, if not completely established, in the course of the day, by the reception of a letter from the missionary in Zululand before mentioned, in which he inquired, on the Zulu king’s behalf, what fault the latter had committed towards the English, that they should be preparing to invade his country. The missionary added that all was perfectly quiet in Zululand, until the border tribes, seeing the British troops approaching, fled inland in alarm, killing their cattle to prevent their falling into the hands of the invaders, and burying their other possessions where they could not carry them away. In point of fact the “scare” had no foundation whatsoever, and the Zulus were quite as much alarmed by the actual approach of the British troops as the Natalians had been by the imaginary Zulu army. The worst immediate consequence of the mistake was the want, almost amounting to famine, produced amongst the border Zulus by the loss of their cattle. A later and more serious result has been that general impression, which has long obtained credence at home in England, that the colonists of Natal have not only been in fear of their lives on account of the Zulus for many years, but have also had good and sufficient reason for their alarm. But for this fixed, though groundless idea, England would hardly have been in such a hurry to send out additional troops for the protection of the colony as she was in the summer of 1878; to her own great loss and to the very considerable injury of the colony itself, not to speak of its unhappy neighbours and heretofore friends the Zulus. It is certainly true that during the year 1878 the inhabitants of Natal did honestly feel great fear of the Zulus, and of a possible invasion of the colony by them, the alarm in many cases amounting to absolute panic. But this feeling was produced by no warlike menaces from our neighbours, no sinister appearances on our borders. The panic—or “scare,” as it would popularly be called in Natal—was forced upon the people by the conduct and language of their rulers, by the preparations made for war, troops being sent for from England “for defensive purposes” (as was so repeatedly asserted by both Sir Bartle Frere and Lord Chelmsford, then Lieut.-General the Hon. F. A. Thesiger), and by the perpetual agitation of the local newspaper editors.