It has been stated, I may add, that certain chiefs required their subjects on their return home to bring them a tribute in diamonds. This I do not believe ever occurred to any great extent, if at all, as in 1872 a party of diggers to test this rumor, taking the law into their own hands, made a tour through a large portion of the Transvaal and Free State, overhauling thousands of natives homeward bound, without finding a single diamond on any one of them, although on one party numbering some 200 they found 197 guns, £3,000 in gold, and nearly two tons of gunpowder. In contradiction to this, however, the late Sir Bartle Frere told a deputation of the Kimberley Mining Board, which waited upon him during his visit to the Fields in 1880, that in coming down through the Transvaal several traders and other trustworthy people on whom he could rely had informed him that most of the chiefs, and in fact all the great ones, had stores of beautiful diamonds, which had been brought to them, a few at a time, by their young men on their return home from work at the Fields. The native laborer at the present time through contaminating influences has become an adept, and will steal with an adroitness which almost defies detection. In the Brazilian mines every precaution is taken to prevent thieving, but without entire success. A slave on finding a diamond is compelled at the moment of its discovery to notify the fact by holding it up between his finger and thumb. No slave is allowed to remain for any length of time at any one part of the long trough in which the soil is washed for fear he should plant a diamond for subsequent removal. In addition, all are narrowly searched, but in spite of this care the slaves hide diamonds in the sores on their bodies, which they produce by cutting nicks in their skins for this purpose, and ofttimes also swallow them, though when a negro is suspected of doing so the administration of strong purgatives, confinement in a bare room and severe punishment invariably follow. Our free nigger is not a whit behind his South American cousin; he uses his nose, mouth, stomach, ears, toes and hair to conceal the diamonds that he steals, and at nightfall walks home from the mine or from the sorting table singing with an air of _abandon_ which would “deceive the very elect,” the diamond being all the while secreted on his person. This, previous to the passing of the last Act, he could do with impunity, for the searching of servants, although it had been for years permissible to masters, _vide_ Government Notice No. 14, 1872, was not as it is now conducted by a government staff. This was especially the case when native labor was scarce, for then any individual master was afraid to make an exception which could give offense, and which might deprive him at once of the whole of his laborers.