porarily,
to Mr. John Lawrence, the man who was later to be Lord Lawrence and
governor general of India. No doubt he was busy administering many
other details connected with the cession. At any rate he shoved it into
his vest pocket and forgot all about it. Six weeks passed, and one day
another administrator happened to mention to Lawrence that the
authorities had decided what to do with the Koh-i-nur. They were going
to give it to Queen Victoria, he said; and by the way, where was it?
Lawrence suddenly remembered where it was supposed to be. He felt in
his vest pocket. No, it wasn't there. He left the office somewhat
abruptly and got home as quickly as he could. The box, as a matter of
fact, was in his house and the diamond was quite safe. His Indian valet
had found it while changing the contents of his master's pockets from
one suit to another. He thought it was just a worthless piece of glass,
but he never threw anything away as a matter of principle, so Victoria
got her diamond after all.
There
was a big fuss made about the Koh-i-nur when it arrived at Buckingham
Palace. Even a tyro could see that it needed recutting, and the Prince
Consort, with his deep interest in scientific matters, did not consider
himself a tyro. The question immediately arose: who was to do the job?
Victoria and Albert were far too patriotic a pair to consider sending
it overseas when they had a perfectly good jeweler's company at hand,
and that is where they made their mistake, though Mr. Atkinson would
not admit any such thing. For there was evidently only one cutter in
the whole country that Garrard's, the royally patronized jeweler,
deemed worthy of the task, and according to later, franker writers he
could have been better, even though he had been trained in the
Netherlands. In fact, as At-
