thin build, but now bowed and bent with long devotion to study
and leaning over a crucible. His hair, prematurely white, hung down
upon his forehead, but his eye was keen and his mouth sagacious. He
shook hands cordially with the men of science, whom he seemed to
know of old, whilst he bowed somewhat distantly to the South African
interest. Then he began to talk, in very German-English, helping out
the sense now and again, where his vocabulary failed him, by waving
his rather dirty and chemical-stained hands demonstratively about
him. His nails were a sight, but his fingers, I must say, had the
delicate shape of a man's accustomed to minute manipulation. He
plunged at once into the thick of the matter, telling us briefly in
his equally thick accent that he "now brobosed by his new brocess
to make for us some goot and sadisfactory tiamonds."

He brought out his apparatus, and explained--or, as he said,
"eggsblained"--his novel method. "Tiamonds," he said, "were nozzing
but pure crystalline carbon." He knew how to crystallise it--"zat
was all ze secret." The men of science examined the pots and pans
carefully. Then he put in a certain number of raw materials, and
went to work with ostentatious openness. There were three distinct
processes, and he made two stones by each simultaneously. The
remarkable part of his methods, he said, was their rapidity and
their cheapness. In three-quarters of an hour (and he smiled
sardonically) he could produce a diamond worth at current prices
two hundred pounds sterling. "As you shall now see me berform,"
he remarked, "viz zis simple abbaradus."

The materials fizzed and fumed. The Professor stirred them. An
unpleasant smell like burnt feathers pervaded the room. The
scientific men craned their necks in their eagerness, and looked
over one another; Vane-Vivian, in particular, was all attention.
After three-quarters of an hour, the Professor, still smiling, began
to empty the apparatus. He removed a large quantity of dust or
powder, which he succinctly described as "by-broducts," and then
took between finger and thumb from the midst of each pan a small
white pebble, not water-worn apparently, but slightly rough and
wart-like on the surface.

From one pair of the pannikins he produced two such stones, and
held them up before us triumphantly. "Zese," he said, "are genuine
tiamonds, manufactured at a gost of fourteen shillings and
siggspence abiece!" Then he tried the second pair. "Zese,"