ecil, now eighteen years old,
who noted every detail, and studied his crops, his workmen, and his
markets, while Herbert was absent in quest of game and adventure. It was
this spirit which led Herbert westward in 1871, among the earliest of
the immigrants into the diamond fields: before the end of the year Cecil
followed and soon took over and developed his brother's claim. It was no
case of Esau and Jacob; the brothers had great affection for one another
and fitted in together without jealousy. Each lived his own life and
followed his own bent. As Kimberley was the first field in which Cecil
showed his abilities, it is worth while to try to picture the scene. It
remained a centre of interest to him for thirty years, the scene of many
troubles and of many triumphs.

'The New Rush', as Kimberley was called in 1872, was a chaos of tents
and rubbish heaps seen through a haze of dust--a heterogeneous
collection of tents, wagons, native kraals and debris heaps, each set
down with cheerful irresponsibility and indifference to order. The
funnel of blue clay so productive of diamonds had been found on a bit of
the bare Griqualand Veld, marked out by no geographical advantages, with
no charm of woodland or river scenery. Here in the years to come the
great pits, familiar in modern photographs, were to grow deeper and
deeper, as the partitions fell in between the small claims, or as the
more enterprising miners bought up their neighbours' plots. Here the
debris heaps were to grow higher and higher, as more hundreds of Kaffirs
were brought in to dig, or new machinery arrived, as the buckets plied
more rapidly on the network of ropes overhead. In the early 'seventies
there were few signs of these marvels to be seen by the outward
eye--everything was in the rough--but they were no doubt already
existing in the brain of 'a tall fair boy, blue eyed and with somewhat
aquiline features, wearing flannels of the school playing-field,
somewhat shrunken with strenuous rather than effectual washings, that
still left the colour of the red veld dust'.

Here Cecil Rhodes lived for the greater part of ten years, finding time
amid his work for dreams: living, in general, aloof from the men with
whom he did his daily business, but laying here and there the
foundations of a friendship which was to bear fruit hereafter. Rudd,[60]
of the Matabeleland concessions, came out in 1873; Beit,[61] the partner
in diamond fields and gold fields, the co-found