y equanimity.
The burden of the past seemed to slip from me suddenly as on the
morning when I had climbed the linn. I saw my life all lying before me;
and already I had won success. I thought of my return to my own
country, my first sight of the grey shores of Fife, my visit to
Kirkcaple, my meeting with my mother. I was a rich man now who could
choose his career, and my mother need never again want for comfort. My
money seemed pleasant to me, for if men won theirs by brains or
industry, I had won mine by sterner methods, for I had staked against
it my life. I sat alone in the railway carriage and cried with pure
thankfulness. These were comforting tears, for they brought me back to
my old common-place self.

My last memory of Africa is my meeting with Tam Dyke. I caught sight
of him in the streets of Cape Town, and running after him, clapped him
on the shoulder. He stared at me as if he had seen a ghost.

'Is it yourself, Davie?' he cried. 'I never looked to see you again in
this world. I do nothing but read about you in the papers. What for
did ye not send for me? Here have I been knocking about inside a ship
and you have been getting famous. They tell me you're a millionaire,
too.'

I had Tam to dinner at my hotel, and later, sitting smoking on the
terrace and watching the flying-ants among the aloes, I told him the
better part of the story I have here written down.

'Man, Davie,' he said at the end, 'you've had a tremendous time. Here
are you not eighteen months away from home, and you're going back with
a fortune. What will you do with it?' I told him that I proposed, to
begin with, to finish my education at Edinburgh College. At this he
roared with laughter.

'That's a dull ending, anyway. It's me that should have the money, for
I'm full of imagination. You were aye a prosaic body, Davie.'

'Maybe I am,' I said; 'but I am very sure of one thing. If I hadn't
been a prosaic body, I wouldn't be sitting here to-night.'

Two years later Aitken found the diamond pipe, which he had always
believed lay in the mountains. Some of the stones in the cave, being
unlike any ordinary African diamonds, confirmed his suspicions and set
him on the track. A Kaffir tribe to the north-east of the Rooirand had
known of it, but they had never worked it, but only collected the
overspill. The closing down of one of the chief existing mines had
created a shortage of diamonds in the world's markets, and once a