Strong curiosity now wrought in Hogarth, a zeal to lay eyes upon that object which had careered through the heights of space to find that beech-wood and that elm-tree; and during fifteen minutes his little implement digged with the quick-plying movement of a distaff-shuttle, he fighting for breath, anon casting a flying wild glance behind, but still digging.
Now, frequently, he came upon burned objects, twigs, cinders. Even the marl had a scorched look; and his agitation grew to ecstasy.
Something very singular had happened to his mind with regard to this “affair” of Bates: Bates had said that it had fallen on the asteroid night; and O'Hara had told him—falsely, indeed—that a piece of the asteroid, fallen upon the French coast, had had diamonds; yet, somehow, never once had his mind associated the Fred Bates “affair” with the thought of diamonds, but only with the “thousand pounds” which Bates had been promised by old Bond. So at the moment when he had begun to dig, his whole thought was of “a thousand pounds”; but, somehow, by the time his implement at last grated against something two feet down, that word “diamonds” had grown up in his brain.
But diamonds! In the midst of his shovelling the thought flashed through him: “The world is God's! and to whom He wills He gives it....”
Now at last the thing lay definitely before him: he grated the spade from end to end, scraping away the marl; and it was very rough....
The size and shape of a man's leg, and red, anyway in the red lantern-shine—his sight dim—he moved and saw in an improbable dream; and when he tried to lift the object and failed, for a long time he sat on the edge of the trench, passing one palm across and across his forehead, till the lantern-light leapt, and went out.
He sprang upright then—awake, sure: they were diamonds, those bits of glass, big celestial ones, not of earth, in hundreds; when he passed his hand along the meteorite he felt it leprous, octahedron, dodecahedron, large and small: if they were truly diamonds, he divined that their owner must be as wealthy as some nations.
About three in the morning he managed to raise the meteorite; refilled the trench; and since it still rained, rolled the meteorite to the hollow of the elm, put on his caftan, and with his back on the interior of the tree, his feet on the meteorite, tumbled into a wonderful slumber.