luck
in the traditional manner, passing out before midnight. His friends
picked up his house, complete with furniture and insensible host, and
carried it across the road, where they set it down facing in the other
direction. When he awoke in the morning, he called out to a neighbor,
"I don't know what it is, but something's funny this morning. The sun
just came up on the wrong side."
One
of the civic peculiarities of Kimberley is the prevalence of
debris-washing. Any resident who digs up his own ground to build a
garage or add a wing to his house naturally wants to have the dirt
washed out to see whether it contains diamonds, and there are men who
make a business of debris-washing, carrying their simple gear from spot
to spot, wherever a road is being laid or a building is going up. "Of
course, diamonds turn up here and there," a Kimberley man told me.
"Why wouldn't they? This town was the diggings. But let me warn you, if
you haven't got a license to dig, it's a complicated business finding a
diamond, even on your own property. First, you must report the find to
the police, and then you have to make a statement, and fill out forms,
and all that. Nobody without a license is supposed to have an uncut
diamond in his possession. If you should happen to find one
accidentally, you'd be best advised just to throw it away."
I
hadn't gone to Kimberley for diamonds, or anyway not to acquire them. I
had gone there for history, and history is what I got—plenty of it.
Practically everybody in Kimberley is an amateur historian. The town
has an excellent library, where old newspapers, diggers' licenses, and
other records are carefully preserved, and it is always full of
Kimberley citizens looking up things about Kimberley. It was there
that I met Mr.
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