They stopped firing in the evening, and then the Bakwains retired on account of having no water.  The above sixty are not all men; women and children are among the slain.  The Boers were 600, and they had 700 natives with them.  All the corn is burned.  Parties went out and burned Bangwaketse town, and swept off all the cattle.  Sebubi’s cattle are all gone.  All the Bakhatla cattle gone.  Neither Bangwaketse nor Bakhatla fired a shot.  All the corn burned of the whole three tribes.  Everything edible is taken from them.  How will they live!  They told Sechele that the Queen had given off the land to them, and henceforth they were the masters,—­had abolished chieftainship.  Sir Harry Smith tried the same, and England has paid two millions of money to catch one chief, and he is still as free as the winds of heaven.  How will it end?  I don’t know, but I will tell you the beginning.  There are two parties of Boers gone to the Lake.  These will to a dead certainty be cut off.  They amount to thirty-six men.  Parties are sent now in pursuit of them.  The Bakwains will plunder and murder the Boers without mercy, and by and by the Boers will ask the English Government to assist them to put down rebellion, and of this rebellion I shall have, of course, to bear the blame.  They often expressed a wish to get hold of me.  I wait here a little in order to get information when the path is clear.  Kind Providence detained me from falling into the very thick of it.  God will preserve me still.  He has work for me or He would have allowed me to go in just when the Boers were there.  We shall remove more easily now that we are lightened of our furniture.  They have taken away our sofa.  I never had a good rest on it.  We had only got it ready when we left.  Well, they can’t have taken away all the stones.  We shall have a seat in spite of them, and that, too, with a merry heart which doeth good like a medicine.  I wonder what the Peace Society would do with these worthies.  They are Christians.  The Dutch predicants baptise all their children, and admit them to the Lord’s Supper....”

Dr. Livingstone was not disposed to restrain his indignation and grief over his losses.  For one so patient and good, he had a very large vial of indignation, and on occasion poured it out right heartily over all injustice and cruelty.  On no heads was it ever discharged more freely than on these Transvaal Boers.  He made a formal representation of his losses both to the Cape and Home authorities, but never received a farthing of compensation.  The subsequent history of the Transvaal Republic will convince many that Livingstone was not far from the truth in his estimate of the character of the free and independent Boers.