burg,
and led by Captain Rolleston. The systematic prospecting was begun at
Hebron, where the party was joined by two experienced Australian gold
diggers named Glenie and King, and also by a trader, named Parker, who,
like the Australians, had already been attracted to the locality by the
reports of the diamonds found. These prospectors shovelled the river
gravel into cradles and pursued the methods of placer washing in vogue
in America and Australia. They toiled for many days without sight of a
diamond or a grain of gold dust; they then followed the river twenty
miles down to Klip-drift, opposite the Mission Station at Pniel; there
on January 7, 1870, they found in one of their cradles the first small
diamond, the reward of expert methods in the new field. Then came the
swarm of diamond hunters.
While
the horde of gem seekers toiled and suffered hardships on the Vaal, De
Klerk, a Boer overseer on Jagersfontein, the farm of Jacoba Magdalena
Cecilia Visser, in a pretty green valley near the settlement of
Fauresmith, in the Orange Free State, observed garnets in the course of
a little stream, and, having heard that the diggers
