quently,
he went out again, time after time. He never stayed discouraged for
long. He was, in short, a really keen prospector, and though he was
quite willing to accept any sort of commission in his line of business
and go looking for copper, or gold, or minerals of other sorts, his
favorite private quarry was the diamond. Diamonds won every time. He
didn't mind sacrificing five or six months and a good slice of health
in an emerald hunt, but he'd have been really keen on the ordeal if
he'd been after diamonds. He had a special feeling for them, too.
"Certainly I have no love for the cut and finished article, and nothing
would induce me to wear it; but for the rough stone, and the rough life
entailed in searching for it, I have always had a passion," he wrote.
He was introduced to this kind of search in Brazil, in the diamond
fields of Diamantina and Minas Geraes that were supplying most of the
world with gems before the discoveries in the Vaal, but inevitably he
came to Africa, and there he stayed. It was by mere accident, in a
double sense of the word, that he was to die in London.
Cornell
was a fairly handy man with the pen. He published two books before he
brought out the prospecting volume. One is a collection of war poems,
mostly imitations of Kipling:
We are
plastered up with mud above our eyebrows, Till you couldn't tell our
features from our rear; There is slush in every quarter, and our boots
are full of water, (And there ain't no blooming beer!)
The other is a collection of stories about Africa, under the title A Rip Van Winkle of the Kalahari. I
do not urgently recommend that this work, which appeared in 1915, be
dug up and reprinted, though it isn't a bad example of adventure writ-
