valuable assistance of the Hottentots, they had in
less than a month collected four large stones of pure water, and a
wineglassful of small stones, when, one fine day, going to work calmly
after breakfast, they found some tents pitched, and at least a score
of dirty diggers, bearded like the pard, at work on the ground. Staines
sent Falcon back to tell Bulteel, and suggest that he should at once
order them off, or, better still, make terms with them. The phlegmatic
Boer did neither.

In twenty-four hours it was too late. The place was rushed. In other
words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger's
law.

A thousand tents rose like mushrooms; and poor Bulteel stood smoking,
and staring amazed, at his own door, and saw a veritable procession
of wagons, Cape carts, and powdered travellers file past him to take
possession of his hillocks. Him, the proprietor, they simply ignored;
they had a committee who were to deal with all obstructions, landlords
and tenants included. They themselves measured out Bulteel's farm into
thirty-foot claims, and went to work with shovel and pick. They held
Staines's claim sacred--that was diggers' law; but they confined it
strictly to thirty feet square.

Had the friends resisted, their brains would have been knocked out.
However, they gained this, that dealers poured in, and the market not
being yet glutted, the price was good. Staines sold a few of the small
stones for two hundred pounds. He showed one of the larger stones. The
dealer's eye glittered, but he offered only three hundred pounds,
and this was so wide of the ascending scale, on which a stone of that
importance is priced, that Staines reserved it for sale at Cape Town.

Nevertheless, he afterwards doubted whether he had not better have taken
it; for the multitude of diggers turned out such a prodigious number of
diamonds at Bulteel's pan, that a sort of panic fell on the market.

These dry diggings were a revelation to the world. Men began to think
the diamond perhaps was a commoner stone than any one had dreamed it to
be.

As to the discovery of stones, Staines and Falcon lost nothing by being
confined to a thirty-foot claim. Compelled to dig deeper, they got into
a rich strata, where they found garnets by the pint, and some small
diamonds, and at last, one lucky day, their largest diamond. It weighed
thirty-seven carats, and was a rich yellow. Now, when a diamond is
clouded or off color, it is terribl