Another day I went to the Central Kimberley Diamond Mine.  After going over the mine, my party and myself all “assisted” at the counter in one of the large sheds in picking out diamonds from the heap of small stones just brought up and laid out from the day’s washings.  It is rather a fascinating occupation, turning over the heap with a little triangular piece of tin held in one hand, and continually “scraped” along the board.  I found several diamonds.  We were told, after we had been working diligently for an hour or two—­there were six of us—­that the value of the diamonds we had found, and placed in the manager’s box, was probably L1,200.  This seemed to us a good afternoon’s work.  The entire district of Kimberley seems to teem with diamonds, and yet there is no cessation in the demand for them, and they are still rising in price.  Accidents are frequent at these mines, but excellent provision for meeting these misfortunes is made in the admirably conducted Kimberley Hospital (where there are no less than 360 beds for patients), which I visited during my stay.  It is under the management of a very remarkable woman, Sister Henrietta, and reflects the greatest credit on everyone connected with its conduct, and support.  The number of native cases treated at the Hospital during the year 1887 was 2,975.

Kimberley has risen with immense speed, commencing from what is generally known as a “rush,” to a large and prosperous centre of wealth, trade, and commerce.  There, where only a few years since, was to be found a collection of tents and small huts, I found a city with handsome buildings, churches, stores, institutions, and law courts, and, above all, a well ordered society.  Some of the buildings which I might specially mention, are the Town Hall, the Post Office, the High Court, and the Public Library, which has been in existence about seven years, and is superintended with such excellent results and most gratifying success by the Judge President.  One noticeable fact connected with this Library is that the number of works of fiction annually taken out by the subscribers, exceeds, per head of the population, that of any Public Library in the United Kingdom.

The Kimberley Waterworks, which I also visited, have proved a great boon to this part, of the Colony.  They were erected at a cost of L400,000, the water supply being obtained from the Vaal River, seventeen miles away.

After spending a most pleasant and agreeable week there, I left Kimberley at six o’clock on the morning of June 7, in a wagon drawn by eight horses, and accompanied by five friends, for Warrenton, en route for Bechuanaland and the Transvaal.  This mode of travelling was quite a novelty to me.  Although in this journey of altogether three weeks’ duration, we occasionally put up at one or two hotels, at some of the towns, and sometimes at the farmhouses on our way, we frequently “camped out” on the open veldt, and, after finishing our evening meal of the rough-and-ready provisions we carried with us, supplemented by the game we shot, we wrapped ourselves in our karosses, and slept for the night under the canopy of the starlit sky.  I occupied the wagon, my more juvenile companions lying on the ground beneath it.