Transvaalers,
used always to play the principal part. His friendship with her, however,
was viewed with great displeasure by many who held watch around him.
Circumstances--intentionally brought about, some maintain--conspired to
cause a cooling of the friendship between the two most remarkable
personalities in South Africa. Later on, Miss Schreiner, who was an ardent
patriot, having discovered what she termed and considered to be the
duplicity of the man in whom she had so absolutely trusted, refused to
meet Cecil Rhodes again. Her famous book, "Trooper Peter Halkett of
Mashonaland," was the culminating point in their quarrel, and the break
became complete.

This, however, was but an incident in a life in which the feminine element
never had any great influence, perhaps because it was always kept in check
by people anxious and eager not to allow it to occupy a place in the
thoughts or in the existence of a man whom they had confiscated as their
own property. There are people who, having risen from nothing to the
heights of a social position, are able to shake off former associations:
this was not the case with Rhodes, who, on the contrary, as he advanced in
power and in influence, found himself every day more embarrassed by the
men who had clung to him when he was a diamond digger, and who, through
his financial acumen, had built up their fortunes. They surrounded him day
and night, eliminating every person likely to interfere; slandering,
ridiculing and calumniating them in turns, they at last left him nothing
in place of his shattered faiths and lost ideals, until Rhodes became as
isolated amidst his greatness and his millions as the veriest beggar in
his hovel.

It was a sad sight to watch the ethical degradation of one of the most
remarkable intelligences among the men of his generation; it was
heartrending to see him fall every day more and more into the power of
unscrupulous people who did nothing else but exploit him for their own
benefit. South Africa has always been the land of adventurers, and many a
queer story could be told. That of Cecil John Rhodes was, perhaps, the
most wonderful and the most tragic.

Whether he realised this retrogression himself it is difficult to say.
Sometimes one felt that such might be the case, whilst at others it seemed
as if he viewed his own fate only as something absolutely wonderful and
bound to develop in the future even more prosperously than it had done in
the past. Ther