At Kimberley, which is the only other diamond-producing district of any importance in South Africa, the gem-bearing ground extends over an area of but thirty-three acres, so that open mining has long since given way to shafts, which have now been sunk to a depth of two thousand five hundred feet, galleries being driven through the producing ground at every forty-foot level, precisely as in a coal mine. Kimberley has a romantic and picturesque history. In 1869 you could not have found its name upon the map. In the following year a Boer hunter, pitching his tent on the banks of the Orange River, chanced to pick up a glittering stone from among the pebbles. The news of his find making its way overland to Cape Town, the submarine cables flashed it to every quarter of the globe, so that within a twelvemonth adventurers and fortune-seekers had flocked there in tens of thousands. By 1871 sixteen hundred claims, each thirty-one feet square, were being worked, each man digging out the earth on his own small plot, carrying it to one side, pulverising it by hand, and sifting it for diamonds. The dirt from one claim would fall into a neighbouring one, while some miners could not get their dirt out at all without crossing another's property, so that quarrels and lawsuits and shooting affrays soon began. About this time two quiet, uncommunicative, shabbily clad men appeared at Kimberley and began to buy up the various claims, until, before any one really appreciated what was happening, the whole diamond industry of South Africa was in their hands. Those men were Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato, and the great amalgamation which their skill and shrewdness effected, now known as the DeBeers Consolidated Mining Company, was one of the greatest _coups_ in the history of finance. It is this corporation which the women of the world have to blame for keeping up the price of diamonds, for the first thing it did was to close the greater part of the Kimberley mines, keeping just enough open to produce the amount of stones which experience has proved that Europe and America are able to take at a price high enough to leave a gratifying profit. Although, as a result of this policy, the price of diamonds has been well maintained, the population of Kimberley has been greatly reduced, the one great corporation, with its comparatively small staff of employees and its labour-saving machinery, having taken the place of the horde of independent adventurers of the early days.