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Updated: June 28, 2025
When his birthday came round, she took the greatest pains to choose him presents that he would really like. In 1858, when he was thirty-nine, she gave him "a picture of Beatrice, life-size, in oil, by Horsley, a complete collection of photographic views of Gotha and the country round, which I had taken by Bedford, and a paper-weight of Balmoral granite and deers' teeth, designed by Vicky."
Then with a muttered oath he jumped to the desk in a panic and picking up the heavy paper-weight flung it violently across the room. It struck the panelled wall with a crash and bounded back towards him. At the same instant there came a scuttling sound from the floor, and a brown shape slid down the edge of the room and stopped in the other corner.
The same lamp was burning on the table, giving forth an odor of bad oil, but in addition to this, two candles were lighted, which supplemented in some slight measure the efforts of the lamp. At the end of the table lay a number of documents under a paper-weight, arranged with the neat precision of a methodical man.
The Very Young Man pounded the quivering body for a moment. The Big Business Man handed him a napkin from the tray and the Very Young Man wrapped up the lizard and threw it into the waste-basket. Then he rose to his feet and tossed the paper-weight on to the desk with a crash. "Well, gentlemen," he said, turning back to them with flushed face, "those drugs sure do work.
"That's right," I said, "there's the butcher's. Splendid meat he sells I beg his pardon purveys. Wears wonderfully well. Always follows the hounds on one of his own saddles. And there's the tobacconist. You should see the plugs he keeps. I've got one I use as a paper-weight. We used to think it was a piece of the original Atlantic cable.
He poured the gold coins into a sort of medieval alms-purse hanging at his belt, repeating: "The foot of the Princess Hermonthis to be used for a paper-weight!" Then turning his phosphorescent eyes upon me, he exclaimed in a voice strident as the crying of a cat which has swallowed a fish-bone: "Old Pharaoh will not be well pleased. He loved his daughter, the dear man!"
The old man had an ebony paper-weight on his library table, which he called "the three wise monkeys of Japan." They were carved sitting back to back.
Of that vision had been born the written letter that now lay under the quartz paper-weight the letter that was to be sent, with others, by the next English mail that should go out from Gueldersdorp, which said mail, being intercepted by the Boers, was not for many months to reach its destination.
After luncheon, on entering Rayne's sitting-room, I found him busily fashioning from a sheet of thin cardboard a small square box which he was fitting over a large glass paper-weight, a cube about four inches square which was wrapped in tissue-paper, the corner of which happened to be torn and so revealed the glass. "I'm sending this away as a present," he explained.
It was gold-plated, and Alphabetical pulled it up and used it for a paper-weight in his office for many years, and it is now the only reminder there is in town of the street railway, except a hard ridge of earth over the ties in the middle of Main Street.
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