My Life in Basutoland, By Eugene Casalis. (Religions Tract Society.)—M.
Casalis went out as a missionary to South Africa nearly sixty years ago. In this volume he has put together some of the results of a long and varied experience, and this with a certain vivacity and grace which one does not expect to find in books of this kind. He is serious enough, where the subject demands seriousness ; but he can laugh, and sometimes laugh at himself, as when he tells the story of how he saw seven lions on a single day's journey, much to the astonishment of a veteran traveller, who had been vainly looking for one. The seven "lions" turned out to be deer. He does not give a very favourable idea of the Boers :—" The Boers of the Cape, those of Dutch and French origin indiscriminately, became the elect people, charged with purging a new Canaan from the heathen hordes which infested it." On one occasion, they suppressed by violence a mission which had for its object the civilisation and evangelisation of the wandering Bushmen. Nothing in the book is more interesting than the account of the chief Moshesh. His argument with the missionary about polygamy puts the case very well. Moshesh would gladly have been rid of the system, but shrewdly remarked that it took the chosen people a long time before they set themselves free from it. The introductory chapter about the author's family history is well worth reading. He came of an old Huguenot family of the South, which preserved many vivid traditions of the days of per- secution. His grandmother was taken from her family by a lettre de cachet, and brought up in the Roman faith. She was born in 1736, and her grandson often heard her tell stories of her early days. This is a curious link with the past.
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