The case, however, is very different when we turn to Mr. Shepstone’s witnesses. Of these, nine in number (besides the four natives called by both the Bishop and Mr. Shepstone), seven were natives; the other two being the Secretary for Native Affairs and Mr. John Taylor—a son of Mr. John Shepstone’s first wife by her former husband. Mr. Taylor was a lad of nine at the time, but, having been present with his mother and little sister on the occasion of the attack upon Matshana, was summoned as a witness by Mr. Shepstone. His evidence was chiefly important as helping to prove that Matshana’s party had not the concealed weapons which Mr. Shepstone’s chief native witness Nozitshina said were left by them in immense numbers upon the ground; as he stated that he and his sister went over the ground, after the affair was over, and picked up the assegais, “about eight or nine” in number. But it is important to remark that the very fact of the presence at this meeting of Mrs. Shepstone with her two children, goes far to disprove the account given by Mr. Shepstone in his second “statement,” prepared by him on the occasion of this trial, but which is greatly at variance on some vital points with the narrative written by him on the day after the event, dated March 17th, 1858, for the information of His Excellency the Lieut.-Governor. It seems almost incredible that Mr. John. Shepstone should have, as he says in his second statement, “made up his mind to face almost certain” death, not only for himself and all his men, but for _his wife and her two young children_, on the grounds that it was “too late to withdraw at this stage” (same report), when at any time since the “day or two previous” (_ibid._), when the information in question[50] reached him; according to his account he might have put off the meeting, or at all events have sent his wife and her children to a place of safety. The Secretary for Native Affairs’ evidence could of course be of a merely official character, as he was not present on the occasion. He stated that Mr. John Shepstone’s letters of February 16th and 24th, 1858, asked for by the Bishop, on the subject of the approaching interview with Matshana, could not be found, although they “must have been recently mislaid,” as he himself (the Secretary for Native Affairs) had quoted from one of them in his minute for the Secretary of State in June, 1874. Of Mr. Shepstone’s native witnesses it can only be said that, amongst the seven called by him only, six contradicted themselves and each other to so great an extent as to make their evidence of no value, while the evidence of the seventh was unimportant, and the four witnesses called by both Mr. Shepstone and the Bishop told the same story as did the witnesses of the latter, most unexpectedly to him.