I had bought a few stores on previous visits at a small local store-keeper’s named C. He was a Jew, and had all the curiosity and enterprise of his extraordinary race. And one evening he came to me in a most mysterious manner, and after a lot of circumlocution he told me that if I liked to join him in a trip he would show me a big diamond “as big as the top of his thumb,” and take me to the place where it had been found. And after a great deal of talk he showed me a scrawl from a customer of his in the district, which conveyed such intelligence. This man, he explained, was an old coloured man who had been granted a piece of land somewhere on the northern bank of the Olifants River, on Government ground there, and not far distant from gravels that I had seen and thought well of on my previous trip. C. had several messages to come out and see the stone, and all his efforts to get the old man to bring his precious treasure-trove in had failed, as the finder had heard of the I.D.B. Act, and feared the police would take both him and the stone. Well, it took time to make C. understand the provisions of that Act, but eventually he followed my advice and took out a licence himself, and the pair of us set out for the scene of the find, quite prepared to peg the whole country. The weather had turned both wet and colder, and the discomforts of that three days’ trip in an open cart to Olifants Drift, Ebenezer, and thence in a boat to a lonely part of the north bank of the river, I shall never forget; but suffice to say that at length, cold, wet, tired, and generally disgusted, we stood in a native _pondhoek_ before a frightened old nigger, who, being repeatedly assured that I was not a policeman, and only wanted to see the “diamond” and where it came from, at length dug up from the floor of his hut a tiny tobacco-bag from which, rolled in a whole volume of rags, he eventually produced a big, bright, but utterly worthless quartz crystal! Disheartened and disillusioned, I turned back towards Van Ryn’s Dorp, but my luck was dead out, for scarcely had I passed Olifants Drift when the cart got badly smashed up and I was forced to bivouac for four days on the veldt. It was a wild and lonely spot, and during the first two days of my enforced wait I saw no one, but on the third I woke to find the whole veldt alive with a magnificent flock of beautiful fleecy Angora goats. They were trekking north, and after 3,000-odd of them had passed with their “herds,” a very fine Cape cart hove in sight with their owner. He proved to be a certain Mr. Brand, a nephew of the late president of the O.R.F.S., who had for many years been farming in the Gibeon District of German South-West Africa. He had been to Cape Town to buy these Angoras, with which he intended stocking his farm experimentally, and was trekking with them over the 800-odd miles of wild country between Table Bay and his lonely home.