Laughing
at the idea of taking money for a stone, she refused to sell, but gave
it to him. He showed it later to a friend named O'Reilly and the
latter, when he went soon after to Grahamstown, took it with him and
submitted it to a mineralogist there, Dr. Guibon Ather-stone, who at
once pronounced it to be a diamond. The crystal is variously reported
to have weighed twenty-one and three-sixteenths, and twenty-three and
three-sixteenths carats. After being exhibited at the Paris Exhibition,
it was sold to Sir Phillip Wodehouse, governor of Cape Colony, for
five hundred pounds. The story may be true, or partially true, or like
novels and history, be founded on fact, though it was told among the
diggers on the Vaal river a few years later, that the stone
bought by the governor was picked up at Klipdrift by a Koranna. There
is some confirmation of the latter version in the fact that the first
diggers gathered on the Vaal about Pniel and Klipdrift. This stone,
wherever found, may have been the first diamond recognized in South
Africa, though earlier discoveries have been claimed by travelers
through that country, one of them certainly from the United States, who
said that he picked up a stone in the neighborhood of the Orange river
in 1859, which was afterwards pronounced to be a diamond by several
persons competent to pass judgment. It is probable that diamonds had
been found there at various times without attracting much attention, or
awakening sufficient interest to induce anyone to search for them
through the barren wilds of that sparsely settled country. When
Opportunity stares one in the face she is seldom recognized. The
outcrop of a ledge of ore which afterwards became a famous mine in these
