DISCOVERY OF DIAMONDS AT THE CAPE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1580, 11 March 1887, Page 3

DISCOVERY OF DIAMONDS AT THE CAPE.

It came about in this way. The scene is a BWs farmhouse, where dwells Rip Van Winkle, not in a sleepy hollow, but within white walls, stark and staring on a ridge. R'P Van Winkle is six feet three, with a flat face and dusty light hair, and the joints and thighs of some great beast before the flood. He lives on lumps of mutton, and he Bleeps from one till four, and again from eight till three, he and his family, on a large ground floor of unburned bricks, roofed with camelthorn, and adorned with labels of Colman's mustard and cod liver oil. If he has any manners, they come to him from his French ancestry; for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes drove to the Cape many of the Huguenots of 168"), whose language only died out in the time of the grandfathers of the present owners of the pans and kopjes, round which to-day the buckets creak and the Kafirs chatter. Behind the dam for Rip Van Winkle's sheep and cows lies the melancholy garden of a few poor potatoes and onions, and two or three gum trees close by the kraal where squat the Hottentot cowboys ; and all the way to the distant low, red hills the unbroken sheet of barrenness of the karoo, hot and yellow, with no shadow over it but the wing of ilia passing vulture, wheeling against the pale steel-blue of a lurid sky ; with at intervals, visible for miles, an aloe, or a dwarf acacia, or a clump of cassia, and the low creeping plants with their coloured stars. Here, in this drowsy land, whose inhospitable shore is lined with dead shark?, whose trade was in those days all the flawed and damaged articles of the world, all the salvage of the fire and wreck of the other hemisphere, dozed Rip Van Winkle, without capital, without energy, his only ambition to pay the ancestral debts, to keep the moving sand-hills from bulging in his staring walls. And far, far in the distance, below the hills, great lakes of shining water, with trees upon the strand and breaks of lofty cane. For this old-new home of the diamond is the home af well of Morgana the Fay. In such a farmhouse, with its large table and bureau bearing a Bible and two or three old Dutch books, and the clumsy rifle leaning in the corner, after the evening reading of a chapter in the Boer fashion, a trader named Niekirk, who chanced to be present, told the vroui" Jacobs that the great white shining stones they had just been bearing of remindod him of the pebbles the children played with, picked up along the banks of the neighbouring Orange river. As he spoke there entered O'Reilly, an ostrich hunter. They tried one of the stones on the window glass, and scratched it all over, the scratches remaining there till this day. It was agreed if it turned out a diamond all were to share equally. On his way to Cape Town O'Reilly showed the stone, and was laughed at for his credulity ; it was even taken from him, and recovered with difficulty from the place where it had been thrown ; but" he laughs best who laughs last," for in Cape Town the pebble from the banks of the Orange was pronounced a diamond, and bought by Sir Philip Wodehouse for £SOO. Ten more such were easily found by Jacobs, and early in the next year, 1868, several were picked up along the banks of the Vaal, among them the renowned " Star of South Africa," by a Hottentot shepherd, who sold it to Neikirk, the trader, for £IOO, who disposed of it on the same day for £12,000. Then the rush began in earnest, first to Pniel and the river diggings on the Vaal—Pniel, which stretched with its sea of tents, its hive of men, and chequer of claims, down to the loud and busy river, and up again to the populous heights of Klipdrift. Here and there, but rarely upon the slope, a canteen of dirty canvas, or a plank-built store with roof of corrugated iron; upon the slope, all pocked with holes, so that all looked like some rude and careless cemetery. Within three months of the first discovery there were 5000 digging there. —From •* Diamonds," in the Cornhill Magazine.