20	GEMS AND PRECIOUS STONES IN THE
	founds hardness with strength. The fragments of the black diamond scratched corundum with ease, thereby proving its genuineness. The next discovery reported is that mentioned by Professor Genth,—two diamonds, one a beautiful octahedron, from the Portis Mine in Franklin County. These specimens, as before remarked, came from localities remote from all the others, and must have been either transported a long distance by river action, or else derived from the belt of gneissic rocks that extends from Richmond to Raleigh. McDowell County has yielded two specimens, one a small crystal found some years ago on the head waters of Muddy Creek, and a much larger one, picked up on the surface in 1886, at Dysortville. This is a somewhat distorted and twined hex-octahedron of 4 1/2 carats' weight, 10 millimeters in height and 7 millimeters in diameter, transparent, but with a gray­ish-green tinge of color, and is valued, for gem purposes alone, at from $100 to $150. The circumstances of its discovery are thus related : Willie Chrystie, the twelve-year-old son of Grayson Chrystie, was sent for a pail of water to a spring on the Alfred Bright farm, in Dysortville. While sitting at the spring, he saw a glistening object among the gravel, and picking it up as a " pretty trick," brought it home. It lay on a shelf almost un­noticed for a fortnight, and was then shown at the store of the vil­lage grocer. Here it became an object of general curiosity, and elicited various opinions, until the idea grew that it was probably a diamond. It was sent to Tiffany & Co., of New York, and its real character at once determined. A year later the present writer visited the spot, and fully authenticated all the facts of the discovery. The sediment in the bed of the spring was taken out and examined, and also the small hollows on the adjacent hillside. None of the ordinary associations of the dia­mond were observed, and hence it is probable that the crystal was washed down with decomposing rock-soil from higher ground, perhaps during some freshet; or possibly it may have been carried to the spring by miners, and left unobserved or un­recognized among the " wash-up " of the gold-bearing sand from some neighboring placer. There are gold mines in McDowell County, worked chiefly by hydraulic sluicing, but as a rule the stones that remain in the sluices are carefully examined, as the