dwelling
places and shops and office buildings, but the sense of get-rich-quick
urgency that had earlier animated it had now moved on to Johannesburg,
where many of the old-time Kim-berley magnates were settled in happily
making second or third or fourth fortunes in gold. Yet Kimberley was
far from dead. The mines were working and diamonds flowed up to the
surface, but the town was already becoming what it is today, a
residential place where citizens lived quietly and talked a good deal
about old times. They had a stirring lot of old times to talk about,
with the Boer War so recently over and Cecil Rhodes only just dead. (He
had died six weeks before Ernest arrived in South Africa, gasping for
breath in his little cottage at Muizenberg at the Cape.) The memory of
Jameson's Raid, when a band of British volunteers tried to wrest
Johannesburg from the Boers, was still vivid, and the rights and wrongs
of its famous debacle were hotly debated: for that matter they still
are, in Kimberley.
Ernest
was twenty-two years old when he arrived in South Africa. He was keenly
ambitious: he knew exactly what he wanted to do, but it sounded so
startling that he hesitated to confide the scope of his vision to any
of his contemporaries. His aim was simple but gloriously out of reach:
he intended to make a huge, specific fortune—fifty thousand pounds, no
less —and retire on it. He figured that if he could save up that much
and invest it wisely at 5 per cent, he would have enough of an
income—twenty-five hundred pounds a year, or twelve thousand five
hundred dollars at the current exchange rate—to live on. He would then
settle down to reading and studying for the rest of his life. But an
achievement of this ambition was wildly improbable, he knew, and in the
meantime he went to the
