is no getting one's great-coat,
which has to serve both as saddle and blanket, to stick on; and then the
long horns in front, with which he can give one a punch in the abdomen
if he likes, make us sit as bolt upright as dragoons. In this manner I
traveled more than 400 miles." Visits to some of the villages of the
Bakalahari gave him much pleasure. He was listened to with great
attention, and while sitting by their fires and listening to their
traditionary tales, he intermingled the story of the Cross with their
conversation, and it was by far the happiest portion of his journey.
The people were a poor, degraded, enslaved race, who hunted for other
tribes to procure them skins; they were far from wells, and had their
gardens far from their houses, in order to have their produce safe from
the chiefs who visited them.

Coming on to his old friends the Bakaa, he found them out of humor with
him, accusing him of having given poison to a native who had been seized
with fever on occasion of his former visit. Consequently he could get
little or nothing to eat, and had to content himself, as he wrote to his
friends, with the sumptuous feasts of his imagination. With his usual
habit of discovering good in all his troubles, however, he found cause
for thankfulness at their stinginess, for in coming down a steep pass,
absorbed with the questions which the people were putting to him, he
forgot where he was, lost his footing, and, striking his hand between a
rock and his Bible which he was carrying, he suffered a compound
fracture of his finger. His involuntary low diet saved him from taking
fever, and the finger was healing favorably, when a sudden visit in the
middle of the night from a lion, that threw them all into consternation,
made him, without thinking, discharge his revolver at the visitor, and
the recoil hurt him more than the shot did the lion. It rebroke his
finger, and the second fracture was worse than the first. "The
Bakwains," he says, "who were most attentive to my wants during the
whole journey of more than 400 miles, tried to comfort me when they saw
the blood again flowing, by saying, 'You have hurt yourself, but you
have redeemed us: henceforth we will only swear by you.' Poor
creatures," he writes to Dr. Bennett, "I wished they had felt gratitude
for the blood that was shed for their precious souls."

Returning to Kuruman from this journey, in June, 1843, Livingstone was
delighted to find at length a letter f