The name written above is to be pronounced Tabaancho and belongs to one of the most interesting places in South Africa. Thaba ’Ncho is a native town in which live about 6,000 persons of the Baralong tribe under a Chief of their own and in accordance with their own laws. There is nothing like this elsewhere on the continent of South Africa, or, as I believe, approaching it. Elsewhere it is not the custom of the South African Natives to live in towns. They congregate in kraals, more or less large,--which kraals are villages surrounded generally by a fence, and containing from three or four huts up to perhaps a couple of hundred. Each hut has been found to contain an average of something less than four persons. But Thaba ’Ncho is a town, not fenced in, with irregular streets, composed indeed of huts, but constructed with some idea of municipal regularity. There has been no counting of these people, but from what information I could get I think I am safe in saying that as many as 6,000 of them live at Thaba ’Ncho. There are not above half-a-dozen European towns in South Africa which have a greater number of inhabitants, and in the vicinity of Thaba ’Ncho there are other Baralong towns or villages,--within the distance of a few miles,--containing from five hundred to a thousand inhabitants each. They possess altogether a territory extending about 35 miles across each way, and within this area fifteen thousand Natives are located, living altogether after their own fashion and governed in accordance with their own native laws. Their position is the more remarkable because their territory is absolutely surrounded by that of the Orange Free State,--as the territory of the Orange Free State is surrounded by the territories of Great Britain. The Republic which we know as the Free State is as it were an island within the ocean of the British Colonies, and the land of the Baralongs is again an island circled by the smaller sea of the Republic. And this is still more remarkable from the fact that whereas the Natives have been encouraged on all sides to make locations on British territory they have been altogether banished as a land-holding independent people from the Free State. Throughout the British Colonies of South Africa the number of the Natives exceeds that of the Europeans by about eight to one. In the Republic the Europeans exceed the Natives by two to one. And the coloured people who remain there,--or who have emigrated thither, which has been more generally the case,--are the servants employed in the towns and by the farmers. And yet, in spite of this, a separate nation of 15,000 persons lives quietly and, I must say, upon the whole prosperously within the Free State borders, altogether hemmed in, but in no way oppressed.