applicants
for work than they can use. It is one manager's cynical belief that
some of his most persistent repeaters are men who don't like too much
of their wives' company and come to find refuge behind the fences. In
any case, after a man has signed on two or three times running, and
spent his period of nine months or whatever has been nominated in the
bond that many times, the labor manager rather discourages another
term. "I tell him to go home and visit his wife for a few months, and
come back later if he wants to," he said. "I think they like the
security of the life here. You get to know them pretty well after a
while."
Finally
we reached the house where the end produce of all this activity could
be seen, in trays of diamonds undergoing sorting according to size and
color. There were little pointes natives, big ones, in-between
ones, yellow, amber, white, and blue—and, of course, a life-size model
of the Cullinan, and again I thought sadly of what might happen to a
stone that size, or anywhere near it, in the works of the Premier
today. The fact is, though they consist of the hardest substance in the
universe, diamonds are brittle and easily breakable if you hit them at
just the right angle. This casts a lurid light on some of the stories
of the early days of Kimberley, when one of the supposedly scientific
tests of a doubtful stone was to give it a good swipe with a hammer.
The diggers honestly believed that though quartz crystal would smash
under this treatment, genuine diamond would not. Louis Cohen, who was
Barney Bamato's first partner when they were both green boys,
recounted in his memoirs how on his first attempt at diamond buying he
invested three of his very few pounds in a small
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