Sibyl.  But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds, must have been appointed to some good purpose?

L. Quite conceivably so, my dear:  as also earthquakes and pestilences; but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight.  The practical, immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence is to slay us, like moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way.  So, the practical, immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied destruction of souls (in whatever sense you have been taught to understand that phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God’s earth:  and a wise nation will live out of the way of them.  The money which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast.  Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the jeweler.

Sibyl.  Would it be more beautiful uncut?

L. No; but of infinite interest.  We might even come to know something about the making of diamonds.

Sibyl.  I thought the chemists could make them already?

L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they are formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed there at all.  These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept down with the gravel and gold; only we can trace the gravel and gold to their native rocks, but not the diamonds.  Read the account given of the diamond in any good work on mineralogy;—­you will find nothing but lists of localities of gravel, or conglomerate rock (which is only an old indurated gravel).  Some say it was once a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred wood; but what one would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make itself into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale.

Sibyl.  Are they wholly the same, then?

L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead; but nothing to hinder its crystallization.  Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless diamond, though they would be H H H pencils to purpose, if it crystallized.

Sibyl.  But what is crystallization?

L. A pleasant question, when one’s half asleep, and it has been tea-time these two hours.  What thoughtless things girls are!

Sybil.  Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that.

L. My dear, it would take a week to tell you.

Sibyl.  Well, take it, and tell us.

L. But nobody knows anything about it.

Sibyl.  Then tell us something that nobody knows.

L. Get along with you, and tell Dora to make tea.