CHAPTER LXIX.
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
-- Pudd'nhead Wilsons's New Calendar.
There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.
-- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
Next to Mr.Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in South Africa was the diamond-crater.

The Rand gold fields are a stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it was only another and lovelier variety of our Great Plains; the natives were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for the towns, I could find my way without a guide through the most of them because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a splendid and absorbing novelty.

Very few people in the world have seen the diamond in its home.

It has but three or four homes in the world, whereas gold has a million.

It is worth while to journey around the globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which the globe has in stock.
The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about 1869, I think.