I have known cases of the most extraordinary character, one I will mention in particular. On the prisoner’s first conviction, he received a sentence of five years’ imprisonment, but was liberated after fifteen months’ incarceration, when, at once resuming the same sneaking kind of theft, he was caught again, and seven years awarded to him to ponder over his outrages. _Mirabile dictu!_ thirteen months saw him, through his excellency the governor’s kindness, a free man once more; but with well-earned experience, as he now, the third time of asking, makes Free Town, in the adjoining republic, not Kimberley, the safe base of his dishonest operations. The hammer which shivered this man’s links must have been heavily weighted indeed! As he told me, one hammer, which of itself was not heavy enough to complete the work, weighed £850. [Illustration] CHAPTER XV. DESCRIPTION OF THE I. D. B.—PUBLIC MORALS.—THE MUSIC HALLS AND THEIR SONGS.—“M. L. A.’S AND M. L. C.’S IN LEAGUE WITH THIEVES AND RECEIVERS.” Illicit diamond buyers are like the devils recorded in the gospel, whose name was “legion, for they were many.” The illicits are not only many in number, but also many in species. The genus has little changed from the earlier times, for the I. D. B. was and is simply a receiver of stolen goods, well knowing them to be stolen, nothing more and nothing less. But the species of this genus are so numerous that their accurate categorist would almost rival a Linnæus or a Cuvier. Some of the species are as extinct as the dodo; others have changed as remarkably as diseases, which once epidemic have become endemic, and members of the latter class, might, if classically inclined, appropriately quote, with reference to their altered position: “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.” The I. D. B. of 1872 was not the I. D. B. of to-day; the I. D. B., whose canvas canteen, thronged by semi-nude Shangaans, Zulus, Basutos or Ballapins, was occasionally burnt over his head, was a different person in his _modus operandi_ and manner of living from the “speculator” of 1885. The “kopje walloper,” who was generally a gentleman of the Hebrew persuasion hailing from Petticoat Lane or the Minories, was one of those who, when diamond buying was as legal in the open air as in a properly registered office, used to haunt the edge of the mine. With satchel at side, well lined with gold and notes, sometimes on the chance of buying a diamond cheaply, trading on the ignorance of the finder, but generally with the view of tempting sorters to steal from the sorting table, he is now almost forgotten, although his moral counterpart exists to this day in the scoundrel who tempts, and but too often successfully, the white servants of a company or a claim-holder to become thieves, or to conveniently wink at the thieving of others.