To
the restless spirit and purely speculative mind of Barnett Isaacs there
was magnetic attraction in such a field with its novel and gleaming
opportunities. With instant decision he took the steamer for Cape Town,
and made the tiresome trip over veld and karoo to Kimberley with
unfailing pluck and good temper.
He
was only twenty years old, and outwardly no more than a light-hearted
boy, bubbling over with high spirits and comical conceits. But his
fondness for athletic sports, theatrical extravaganzas, and practical
jokes, and his contempt for conventional restraints, were merely the
surface froth covering invincible energy and facile grasp of
opportunities. He had an unshakable self-reliance, a quick perception,
and a fertile resourcefulness that bore him up when feebler men sank.
One could scarcely cast him in any society or any place on earth, where
his nimble wits would not win him a living.
The
impulse to go ahead was in his blood. " It has always been a
superstition with me," he said, " never to turn back." He grew apace
with the calls upon his powers. He did not profess to know more than
he knew, but he was never content to know anything that interested him
by report. " I must look into everything that concerns me for myself."
This determination was a safeguard. He once boasted, in a rare fit of
parade, that he had never made a mistake in his investment of money in
his life. But his incessant activity was fatally wearing. He could not
dawdle. He could hardly rest. For many years his extraordinary vitality
and endurance kept him running. He had the precious faculty of dropping
off to sleep at any moment of relaxation, and awaking after slumbering
for a few moments. Nevertheless no creature of flesh and blood could
endure the strain which he bore and recklessly courted. " Some day such
a bundle of quivering nerves must snap, either life or brain must go,"
said one of his closest friends. But when young Barnett Isaacs wandered
into Dutoitspan, "fit for anything," as he himself declared, after his
long tramp and meals of porridge and biltong, nobody saw in him the raw
material of one of the
