Now would the reader be surprised to hear, that shortly after this incident, the husband of the landlady, whose eyesight had been so very defective, was suddenly seized with a desire to visit the Transvaal, possibly to investigate the gold-bearing qualities of that State, perhaps merely for an agreeable change. He did not, however, confine his peregrinations to the suzerainty, but proceeded to make an amateur survey of the proposed railway route between Pretoria and Delagoa Bay over the Lebombo Mountains. From the latter place he set sail for Rotterdam, which he reached in a much more satisfied frame of mind than his whilom lady boarders possessed on their arrival in London. As all the world knows diamond cutters are to be found in considerable numbers in Holland, and it did not take him long to renew acquaintance with his old friends, some of whom were skilled in that trade. To one of these he intrusted the cutting of a valuable parcel of gems, which by an almost inexplicable coincidence was the exact counterpart of that which a few months before had disappeared so mysteriously at his antipodean hotel. Now, our Boniface was a gay old dog in his way, so he made up his mind to taste once more the long absent pleasures of the capitals of Europe, serenely conscious that a little extravagance was pardonable in a landlord whose very table linen produced more diamonds in one shaking than many a twelve-foot washing machine, worked by a Davy Paxman, would in thousands of revolutions. While enjoying the gayeties of Vienna, he received a telegram to the effect that his diamonds had been duly cut and were awaiting his disposal. So he at once returned to Holland, received his gems and secured the services of a well-known goldsmith for their setting, which proved in accordance with his orders both elaborate and costly. When all was completed he started once more for his South African home. Many a night, ere the billows rocked him to sleep, though congratulating himself on his lucky journey, he mentally execrated the tyranny of a government which he knew too well would on his arrival in Capetown heartlessly exact from him a certain duty of 30 per cent. _ad valorem_. The thought of this unwarrantable interference with the liberty of the subject haunted him continually, until one night as his cabin companion told me he was disturbed by a delighted chuckle followed by a semi-audible soliloquy: “Shtrike me dead, I’ve got it, pay the dam duty, not if I knowsh it, sho’elp me. I’ll risk it.” Arrived at Capetown he induced a female passenger with whom he was acquainted, to conceal about her person the diamonds which already had had so strange a story, and thus endeavor to evade the eagle eyes of the revenue officials stationed at the dock entrance.