OCR Rendition - approximate

334 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws affecting the massacres of Weenen, Bushman's river, and of Blaauwkrantz, when hundreds of men, women, and children were surprised and slain by Dingaan's impis, all these afford something more than material for a tragedy or thrilling romance. The history is full of instruction how to defend and protect peaceful agriculturists within reach of savage neighbours. Again, how the Trek Boers, never mustering a thousand guns, finally defeated Dingaan's tens of thousands of unconquered warriors;-how the Boers never moved camp till they had scouted the country for ten or twelve miles on their purposed line of march ;-how they moved with their mounted fighting men in pairs (the Boer and his " Achter Pyter " with his spare firelock), thrown out in advance and on each flank for a distance of four or five miles in every direction;--how at the slightest alarm of a body of the enemy in sight, the wagons were closed up or moved into " laager ;"-how the wagon " laager," with more women and children than men inside it, was rendered as impregnable as a British infantry square at Waterloo or Ulundi ;-how the wagons, parked so as to protect the oxen as well as the people, were fenced with brushwood and skins, so as to be impervious to a rush of pike men ;-how the women and children helped to load the cumbrous " roer " or elephant gun, and, if need were, sometimes with hatchet or knife, defended the wagon from Kaffirs creeping in through unguarded loopholes, these and many other details have a romantic interest for all readers, but they contain many valuable lessons for the military student, even when he has to imagine earthworks in place of wagon " laagers " and firearms with a range of 2,000 yards in place of " Brown Bess," good for a hundred yards, or the assegai of little effect above thirty. It would take some time fully to describe the effects of the growth of the Zulu power on their neighbours, but there are three or four movements of the population which must not pass without some notice, however brief. 1. The first is the emigration of Moselekatze, an account of which, by a nearly contemporary observer, will be found in Harris' " Wild Sports in South Africa." It is, I have been informed on the authority of Cetywayo, the modern Zulu belief that Moselekatze was despatched by the Zulu king to " eat up " a Bechuana tribe beyond the Drackensberb that he succeeded in his enterprise, but, instead of returning, as ordered, to the Zulu capital with his plunder and captives he marched on northward and westward, through what is now the Orange Free State and Transvaal, destroying and " eating up " tribe after tribe of comparatively peaceful and civilized Bechuanas, by whom that part of the Transvaal was then densely