The first record, in date, which I have read of the Basutos is in a simple volume written by a Missionary, the Rev. E. Cassalis, who was one of a party of French Protestants sent out nearly 50 years ago from Paris to the Cape with the double object of comforting the descendants of the French emigrants and of converting the Natives. It was the fate of M. Cassalis,--who though he writes in English I presume to have been a Frenchman,--to establish a mission at a place called Moriah in Basutoland in 1833, and to write a book about Basuto Manners. He does not really tell us very much about the people, as, with laudable enthusiasm, he is more intent on the ways of Providence than on the details of history. If hardships and misfortunes come he recognises them as precious balms. If they are warded off he sees the special mercy of the Lord to him and his flock. The hyænas were allowed to take his sheep, but an “inexorable lion,” who made the “desert echo with the majestic sounds of his voice,” was not permitted by Providence to touch himself. Something, however, is to be gleaned from his tale. The people among whom he had come were harassed terribly by enemies. They were continually attacked by Moselekatze, the Chief of the Matabeles, whom M. Cassalis calls Zulus;[15]--and also by roaming bands of the Korannas, a tribe of Bedouin South African Savages, only one degree, if one degree, better than the Bushmen. With these Moshesh was always fighting, entrenching himself when hard pressed on a high rock called Thaba Bosio or Thaba Bosigo, from whence he would hurl down stones upon his assailants very much to their dismay. The Basutos seem to have been a brave people, but reduced by their enemies to very hard straits, so that they were driven by want, in those comparatively modern days,--for we are speaking of a period within the lifetime of the father of the existing Chief of the tribe,--to have resort to cannibalism for support.