On the morning appointed about twenty Kafirs came to me, clustering round the door of the house in which I was lodging,--but they declined to enter. I therefore held my levee out in the street. Sandilli was not there. The reason for his absence remained undivulged, but I was told that he had sent a troop of cousins in his place. The spokesman on the occasion was a chief named Siwani, who wore an old black coat, a flannel shirt, a pair of tweed trousers and a billycock hat,--comfortably and warmly dressed,--with a watch-key of ordinary appearance ingeniously inserted into his ear as an ornament. An interpreter was provided; and, out in the street, I carried on my colloquy with the dusky princes. Not one of them spoke but Siwani, and he expressed utter dissatisfaction with everything around him. The Kafirs, he said, would be much better off if the English would go away and leave them to their own customs. As for himself, though he had sent a great many of his clansmen to work on the railway,--where they got as he admitted good wages,--he had never himself received the allowance per head promised him. “Why not appeal to the magistrate?” I asked. He had done so frequently, he said, but the Magistrate always put him off, and then, personally, he was treated with very insufficient respect. This complaint was repeated again and again. I, of course, insisted on the comforts which the Europeans had brought to the Kafirs,--trousers for instance,--and I remarked that all the royal princes around me were excellently well clad. The raiment was no doubt of the Irish beggar kind but still admitted of being described as excellent when compared in the mind with red clay and a blanket. “Yes,--by compulsion,” he said. “We were told that we must come in and see you, and therefore we put on our trousers. Very uncomfortable they are, and we wish that you and the trousers and the magistrates, but above all the prisons, would go--away out of the country together.” He was very angry about the prisons, alleging that if the Kafirs did wrong the Kafir Chiefs would know how to punish them. None of his own children had ever gone to school,--nor did he approve of schools. In fact he was an unmitigated old savage, on whom my words of wisdom had no effect whatever, and who seemed to enjoy the opportunity of unburdening his resentment before a British traveller. It is probable that some one had given him to understand that I might possibly write a book when I returned home.