wn of early morning, when he started for
those long rides of which he was so fond, he became affectionate, kind,
thoughtful and tender. There he thought, he dreamt, he planned, and the
result of these wanderings of his mind into regions far beyond those where
the people around him could stray was that he revealed himself as God had
made him and such as man hardly ever saw him.

Rhodes had always been a great reader; books, indeed, had a great
influence over his mind, his actions and opinions. He used to read slowly,
and what he had once assimilated he never forgot. Years after he would
remember a passage treating of some historical fact, or of some social
interest, and apply it to his own work. For instance, the idea of the Glen
Grey Act was suggested to him by the famous book of Mackenzie Wallace
dealing with Russia,[B] in which he described the conditions under which
Russian peasants then held their land. When Rhodes met the author of the
aforementioned volume at Sandringham, where both were staying with the
then Prince and Princess of Wales, he told him at once, with evident
pleasure at being able to do so, that it was his book which had suggested
that particular bit of legislation.

[B] "Russia" (Cassell).

Another occasion I remember when Rhodes spoke of the great impression
produced upon his opinions by a book called "The Martyrdom of Man,"[C] the
work of Winwood Reade, an author not very well known to the general
public. The essay was an unusually powerful negation of the Divinity.
Rhodes had, unfortunately for him, chanced across it just after he had
left the University, and during the first months following upon his
arrival in South Africa he read it in his moments of leisure between
looking for diamonds in the sandy plains of Kimberley. It completely upset
all the traditions in which he had been nurtured--it must be remembered
that he was the son of a clergyman--and caused a revolt against the
teachings of his former masters.

[C] Published in the U.S.A., 1875.

The adventurous young man who had left his native country well stocked
with principles which he was already beginning to find embarrassing, found
in this volume an excuse for becoming the personage with whom the world
was to become familiar later on, when he appeared on the horizon as an
Empire Maker. He always kept this momentous book beside him, and used to
read it when he wanted to strengthen himself in some hard resolution or
when he w