It was then shown to the Clerk of the Peace, and finally it reached the Colonial Secretary, and was sent to the Paris Exhibition, where it was sold for five hundred pounds, and established the fact that diamonds could be found in the Colony.
But it was some years yet before people in Cape Colony at all realised the wealth of diamonds which lay scattered at their very feet. A Boer, living at Dutoitspan, found a diamond sticking in the mud walls of which his house was built, and in July, 1871, a man scratched the soil near Colesberg Kopje with his knife, and unearthed a diamond. A town was built round it, which has grown into the modern Kimberley.
So, from John O'Reilly's first diamond of five hundred pounds has grown a great trade, which last year produced diamonds valued at over four million pounds sterling.
There is little doubt that though Cape diamonds were 'discovered' first in 1867, they were known in Africa long ago. Stone and bronze instruments found beside skeletons in the Orange Free State show that pre-historic miners had been at work, and on an old map of 1750 the words, 'Here be diamonds' are written across what is now Griqualand West.
SAD COMPANY IN THE NURSERY.
found in a nursery corner,
A pocket-knife, pen, and a ball,
And this was the story they told me,
If I can remember it all.
'My beautiful handle was broken,'
The pocket-knife mournfully cried,
'When Alfred forced open the clock-face
To see if old Time was inside.'
'And look,' said the ball with a shudder,
'I'm scratched in a horrible way,
Because through the drawing-room window
He carelessly flung me to-day.'