mining property there with the view of forming a company.  Our hero immediately offered his own.  The Frenchman responded to the appeal, but expressed the desire to go down himself into the shaft to examine the property and get some ore in order to test it before the purchase was completed.  The condition was agreed to with eagerness, and a few days later the victim and his executioner proceeded together to the mine.  The Frenchman went down whilst Mr. X——­ remained above.  He walked about with his hands in his pockets, smoking cigarettes, the ashes of which he let fall with an apparent negligence into the baskets of ore which were being sent up by the Frenchman.  When the latter came up, rather hot and dusty, the baskets were taken to Johannesburg and carefully examined:  the ore was found to contain a considerable quantity of gold.  The mine was bought, and not one scrap of gold was ever found in it.  Mr. X——­ had provided himself with cigarettes made for the purpose, which contained gold dust in lieu of tobacco, and the ashes which he had dropped were in reality the precious metal, the presence of which was to persuade the unfortunate Frenchman that he was buying a property of considerable value.  He paid for it something like two hundred thousand pounds, whilst the fame of the man who had thus cleverly tricked him spread far and wide.

The most amusing part of the story consists in its denouement.  The duped Frenchman, though full of wrath, was, nevertheless, quite up to the game.  He kept silence, but proceeded to form his company as if nothing had been the matter.  When it was about to be constituted and registered, he asked Mr. X——­ to become one of its directors, a demand that the latter could not very well refuse with decency.  He therefore allowed his name to figure among those of the members of the board, and he used his best endeavours to push forward the shares of the concern of which he was pompously described on the prospectus as having been once the happy owner.  As his name was one to conjure with the scrip went up to unheard-of prices, when both he and his supposed victim, the Frenchman, realised and retired from the venture, the richer by several hundreds of thousands of pounds.  History does not say what became of the shareholders.  As for Mr. X——­, he now lives in Europe, and has still a reputation in South Africa.

This story is but one amongst hundreds, and it is little wonder that, surrounded as he was with men who indulged in this charming pastime of always trying to dupe their fellow creatures, Rhodes’ moral sense relaxed.  It is only surprising that he kept about him so much that was good and great, and that he did not succumb altogether to the contamination which affected everything and everybody around him.  Happily for him he cherished his own ambitions, had his own dreams for companions, his absorption in the great work he had undertaken; these things were his salvation.  Rhodesia became the principal field of Rhodes’ activity, and the care with which he fostered its prosperity kept him too busy and interested to continue the quest for riches which had been his great, if not his principal, occupation during the first years of his stay in South Africa.