f color, and transparent limpidity make them look like
piles of assorted candies. A very light straw color is their commonest
tint. It seemed to me that these uncut gems must be more beautiful than
any cut ones could be; but when a collection of cut ones was brought out,
I saw my mistake. Nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with the
light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like
it--wavy sea-water with the sunlight playing through it and striking a
white-sand bottom.

Before the middle of July we reached Cape Town, and the end of our
African journeyings. And well satisfied; for, towering above us was
Table Mountain--a reminder that we had now seen each and all of the great
features of South Africa except Mr. Cecil Rhodes. I realize that that is
a large exception. I know quite well that whether Mr. Rhodes is the
lofty and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe him to
be, or Satan come again, as the rest of the world account him, he is
still the most imposing figure in the British empire outside of England.
When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi.
He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings
are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose
speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth; and he is the
only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention
with an eclipse.

That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even
his dearest South African enemies were willing to deny, so far as I heard
them testify. The whole South African world seemed to stand in a kind of
shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike. It was as if he were
deputy-God on the one side, deputy-Satan on the other, proprietor of the
people, able to make them or ruin them by his breath, worshiped by many,
hated by many, but blasphemed by none among the judicious, and even by
the indiscreet in guarded whispers only.

What is the secret of his formidable supremacy? One says it is his
prodigious wealth--a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways
support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals;
another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and
that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the
circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his
vast schemes for the territ