Aman named John O'Reilly died not long ago in a store near Taungs, in the Kimberley district of South Africa. Few people, perhaps, remember or know that this man began the great diamond trade of Africa.

The story is quite a romance. In 1867 the baby son of a Mrs. Jacobs found 'a pretty pebble' near the Orange River, and brought it to his mother. She showed it to a Boer, who offered to buy it. 'You may have it as a gift,' laughed the woman; 'there is no value in it.'

The Boer thought otherwise, and showed it to O'Reilly, who was then a travelling trader. He took it to Colesberg, and there cut his initials with it on the window of an inn, proving the stone to be a diamond.

It was then shown to the Clerk of the Peace, and finally it reached the Colonial Secretary, and was sent to the Paris Exhibition, where it was sold for five hundred pounds, and established the fact that diamonds could be found in the Colony.

But it was some years yet before people in Cape Colony at all realised the wealth of diamonds which lay scattered at their very feet. A Boer, living at Dutoitspan, found a diamond sticking in the mud walls of which his house was built, and in July, 1871, a man scratched the soil near Colesberg Kopje with his knife, and unearthed a diamond. A town was built round it, which has grown into the modern Kimberley.

So, from John O'Reilly's first diamond of five hundred pounds has grown a great trade, which last year produced diamonds valued at over four million pounds sterling.

There is little doubt that though Cape diamonds were 'discovered' first in 1867, they were known in Africa long ago. Stone and bronze instruments found beside skeletons in the Orange Free State show that pre-historic miners had been at work, and on an old map of 1750 the words, 'Here be diamonds' are written across what is now Griqualand West.