This was indeed a time when a visitor to Kimberley could not help being struck with the remarkable amount of business, legitimate and illegitimate, which was transacted in a place so lately a mere desert. As I have already mentioned the streets were thronged with an eager crowd, all engaged in the same pursuit, the purchase or sale of shares; a pursuit which each one firmly believed to be the high road to fortune. Well-nigh every conveyance which arrived on the Fields brought new comers, anxious to share in the supposed good fortune, all the hotels were crowded, and from every drinking bar might be heard the popping of champagne corks; for lucky speculators were lavish with their money, believing as they did that they had hit on an inexhaustible mine of wealth. Diggers who had hitherto scarcely managed to make both ends meet now imagined themselves wealthy, as their claims had been put into companies at a price sufficient to make them comfortable for life; men who before had been contented to work hard for five or six pounds a week secured positions as managers of companies with comparatively enormous salaries, clerks and shopmen became secretaries, and assumed all the dignity of their new positions, and lawyers were employed day and night, drawing up agreements and trust deeds. The insatiate thirst for speculation was not slaked by the opportunity afforded of drinking fortune’s drams in mining ventures alone. Although 113 of these were floated, yet some score of other schemes were thrown out as baits to catch the unwary investor. Brick, coal, laundry, transport, ironmongery, labor supply, theatres, clubs, hotels, aerated waters, in fact the prosecution of every conceivable industry was changed from private hands to those of managers and directors, some directors becoming veritable “guinea pigs,” occupying seats at as many as from ten to fifteen boards at the same time.