to the Secretary
of State, dated 2d February 1880.

Concurrently with, though entirely distinct from, the political
agitation that was being carried on among the Boers having for object
the restoration of independence, a private agitation was set on foot
by a few disaffected persons against Sir T. Shepstone, with the view
of obtaining his removal from office in favour of a certain Colonel
Weatherley. The details of this impudent plot are so interesting, and
the plot itself so typical of the state of affairs with which Sir T.
Shepstone had to deal, that I will give a short account of it.

After the Annexation had taken place, there were naturally enough a good
many individuals who found themselves disappointed in the results so far
as they personally were concerned; I mean that they did not get so much
out of it as they expected. Among these was a gentleman called Colonel
Weatherley, who had come to the Transvaal as manager of a gold-mining
company, but getting tired of that had taken a prominent part in
the Annexation, and who, being subsequently disappointed about an
appointment, became a bitter enemy of the Administrator. I may say at
once that Colonel Weatherley seems to me to have been throughout the
dupe of the other conspirators.

The next personage was a good-looking desperado, who called himself
Captain Gunn of Gunn, and who was locally somewhat irreverently known as
the very Gunn of very Gunn. This gentleman, whose former career had been
of a most remarkable order, was, on the annexation of the country, found
in the public prison charged with having committed various offences, but
on Colonel Weatherley's interesting himself strongly on his behalf, he
was eventually released without trial. On his release, he requested the
Administrator to publish a Government notice declaring him innocent of
the charges brought against him. This Sir T. Shepstone declined to do,
and so, to use his own words, in a despatch to the High Commissioner on
the subject, Captain Gunn of Gunn at once became "what in this country
is called a patriot."

The third person concerned was a lawyer, who had got into trouble on the
Diamond Fields, and who felt himself injured because the rules of the
High Court did not allow him to practise as an advocate. The quartet
was made up by Mr. Celliers, the editor of the patriotic organ, the
"Volkstem," who, since he had lost the Government printing contract,
found that no language could be too stron