I have a Bushman I engaged to look after the waggon with one foot entirely burnt off, and a Bush boy with four fingers of the right hand served in the same way. The man came to me and asked to be employed, and said he would show me the waters. He brought his two daughters with him; their mother was dead. The girls' ages, as well as I could guess, were fourteen and sixteen. I employed them on various duties about the waggons, and found them very willing to learn. I had now a large family to provide for; my own eight boys and seventeen Bushmen, including six women and girls, which was a great help, as they took me to watering-places unknown to hunters, and were my guides to places I should not otherwise have visited. I found if you treat these people well, they are willing to assist in any way. They are a very small race, seldom exceeding four feet ten inches in height. When old, which is at the age of forty, they are very ugly. Their food consists of game, which they kill with their bows and arrows, eggs, roots, mice, locusts, insects, frogs, land-turtle, and anything they may pick up. When I was in the desert in 1872, I had one of the chief Bushmen captains engaged with many of his people to hunt for me. Hearing of the atrocities committed on these Bushmen by the border tribes, I told him to collect a few of the injured ones, and bring them to my waggon, that I might see them. In a week he collected fourteen, all, more or less, having lost a hand or fingers, a foot or a greater part of it. One Bushman had a red-hot iron ramrod forced through his body under the arm-pit and it came out on the other side. I saw the skeleton a few days after it occurred. Some are shot down, and the children stolen and taken for slaves. They are also tied to stakes and burnt to death, and I was taken to the places where these crimes had been committed, and saw the remains and the site of the fire. Having satisfied myself as to the correctness of all these statements from personal inspection and from more than fifty Bushmen who told me of others equally horrible, all of which I noted in my journal, I was frequently importuned by these people to become their chief, which I declined. I was then asked to write to the Great Mother (the Queen) to solicit Her Majesty's protection, and take them over as her children. This, I saw, was impracticable. I then told the chief head-men to call all the Bushman families together near at hand, at a drift where I had had the bad luck to get my waggon capsized, and where there was plenty of water, and to meet me there at the full moon a fortnight hence. True to the appointment, seventy-seven of the head-men and their families were there, forming a large camp, and as quiet and orderly as any assemblage of people could be. I took down the probable number there would be within a radius of seventy miles, from Klasson, the chief spokesman, which numbered 3986.