recourses as shoeing a horse with gold or drinking champagne out of a bucket. The searching for gold and diamonds has always had this danger attached to it,—that the money when it has come has too frequently not been endeared to the finder by hard continuous work. It has been "easy come and easy gone." This to some degree is still the case. There is at Kimberley much more of gambling, much more of champagne, much more of the rowdy exhilaration coming from sudden money, than at older towns of the same or much greater population, or of the same or much greater wealth. But the trade of Kimberley is now a settled industry and as such may be presumed to be beneficent to those who exercise it.
Nevertheless there is a stain sticking to the diamonds,—such a stain as sticks to gold, which tempts one to repeat the poet's caution:—
Aurum irrepertum, et sio melius situm
Cum terra celat, spernere fortior,
Quam cogere humanos in usus.
It would be untrue to say that he who works to ornament the world is necessarily less noble than the other workman who supplies it with what is simply useful. The designer of a room-paper ranks above the man who hangs it,—and the artist whose picture decorates the wall is much above the designer of the paper. Why therefore should not the man who finds diamonds be above the man who finds bread? And yet I feel sure that he is not. It is not only the thing procured but the manner of procuring it that makes or mars the nobility of the work. If there be an employment in
