and forced me, under stress of pelting stones, to climb
up the steep pitch and ring the bell. When the indignant inhabitants of
the surrounding tents swarmed out my friends decamped, leaving me
stranded. However, the sand was soft, so I dropped down and managed to
escape.

Cecil Rhodes had a rusty black pony named "Bandersnatch" which
I occasionally rode when shooting, game being more or less
plentiful within a few miles of the mine. He also owned one of the
strangest-looking dogs I have ever seen. It had no vestige of a tail,
and, generally, it bore a strong resemblance to an exaggerated guinea
pig.

In the days I write of Cecil and Herbert Rhodes were working a claim
near the north end of No. 10 Road. They found a fair number of
diamonds, but no large stones. I was working on shares a small piece of
ground in the same road, the property of Gray Barber. By this time the
rudimentary plan of sorting the gravel on one's claim had, of
necessity, been superseded. Every digger had a depositing-floor to
which his ground was carted or harrowed. Of the original surface of
the mine only the roadways were left standing, vast chasms of varying
depth lying between. The "stuff" a green, tenacious, decomposed rock
of the consistency of very tough pot-clay, but granular and abounding
in mica would be loosened with a pick, hauled up to the level of the
road by means of bucket, rope, and pulley, and then conveyed to the
depositing-floor.

The bulk of the native labor at the diamond-fields was drawn from
Bechuanaland and the northern Transvaal. Many of the natives from the
latter vicinity belonged to the Baphedi tribe, whose chief was the
celebrated Sekukuni. These people used to arrive in an unspeakably
miserable physical condition; they had traveled hundreds of miles
almost without food. Literally, they were nothing but skin and bone.
But after a week's feeding on impoop, as they called the mealie-meal
porridge which was their staple food at the mines, they began to pick
up. At the end of a month they would be sleek and in first-rate fettle.

It is practically certain that before leaving home these people had
been instructed in the art of diamond-stealing. That such was the case
may, I think, be inferred from the following incident. A friend of
mine bought six "boys" (we used to buy these creatures from the
labor touts at 1 per head), and put them the same day to work on his
depositing-floor, smashing lumps of "stuff." He and I w