measuring-tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms. Mr. Hahn gave me a very interesting account of the first establishment of the Damara mission. He was permitted to leave Jonker’s place after much trouble, and encamped amongst the negroes in company with Mr. Rath and Mr. Bam. None of them knew a word of the language. No European had ever as yet learnt it, and the natives laughed at them, and annoyed them most excessively; they were mobbed and could do scarcely anything. At last, a lazy fellow, with his nose half-bitten off by a hyena, attached himself to them. He happened, besides being lazy, to be also a particularly intelligent man, and soon understood what the missionaries were driving at, when they endeavoured to get at the pronouns and tenses of this tongue of prefixes. He was of the greatest use to them, and, mainly through his aid, they have, after five or six years’ labour, fully acquired the language. Their grammar and dictionary were to have been sent in 1852, to the professor of philology at Bonn, and have probably been received by this time. This man’s nose was seized by a hyena while he was asleep on his back—very unpleasant, and an excellent story to frighten children with. I could hardly believe it until a case occurred—quite _à-propos_. An old Bushwoman, who encamped under the lee of a few sticks and reeds that she had bent together, after the custom of those people, was sleeping coiled up close round the fire, with her lank feet straggling out in the dark, when a hyena, who was prowling about in the early morning, laid hold of her heel, and pulled her bodily half out of the hut. Her howls alarmed the hyena, who quitted his hold; and she hobbled up the next morning to us for plaisters and bandages. The very next night the old lady slept in the same fashion as before, and the hyena came in the same way, and tugged at her heel just as he had done the previous evening. The poor creature was in a sad state; and I and one of Mr. Hahn’s men sat up the next night to watch for the animal. I squatted in the shade of her house; my companion covered a side-path, and the woman occupied her hut as a bait. It was a grand idea, that of baiting with an old woman. The hyena came along the side-path, and there received his quietus. All along the country about us was in the utmost confusion; but we were not annoyed at Barmen. Once indeed men came with the news that a body of Damaras had been seen prowling behind the rocks that form a broken background to the station; and we got everything ready for an attack, and watched through the night, but nothing came.