The evidence before the court, however, was given under circumstances which, if Sir B. Pine’s account of native witnesses be correct, adds enormously to the value of the fact that out of these twenty-four witnesses, summoned from various quarters, many of them without opportunity of communicating either with the Bishop or with each other, but one[49] failed when it came to the point; and he, a feeble old man, just released from prison (one of the captured tribe), was manifestly in a state of abject alarm at finding himself brought up to witness against the Government whose tender mercies he had so lately experienced, and contradicted before Colonel Colley the greater part of the story which he had originally told the Bishop. This poor creature had been intimidated and threatened by a certain man named Adam, under whose surveillance he lived after being released from gaol, and who actually turned him and his family out at night as a punishment for his having obeyed a summons to Bishopstowe. He was manifestly ready to say anything which would relieve him from the fear of the gaol, which he pleaded to Mr. Shepstone a day or two later; on which occasion he unsaid all he had previously said, having, as he afterwards confessed, been warned by Mr. Shepstone’s policeman Ratsha, who asked him for what purpose he had been summoned by the Bishop, _not to speak a word about_ “Mr. John’s” treatment of Matshana. But, with the best intentions, the man did not succeed in making his story tally entirely with that of Mr. Shepstone’s other witnesses, nor with Mr. Shepstone’s own. With this one exception the Bishop’s witnesses told the same story in all essential respects. They were men arriving from many different and distant parts of the colony, from Zululand, and from the Free State, who could not possibly have combined to tell the same story in all its details, which, if false, would have been torn to pieces when so many men of different ages and characters were cross-examined by one so thoroughly acquainted with all the real facts of the case as Mr. Shepstone—men who had nothing to expect from the Bishop, but had everything to dread from the Government if proved to have brought a false and foul charge against an officer so highly placed and so powerfully protected; _yet not the least impression was made upon the strength of their united evidence_.