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Updated: August 10, 2024
If the Cullinan Diamond had been placed in Nancy's keeping, rather than worry about it as she worried about Junior, she would have flung it gaily into the East River.
Huge crystals, worth untold millions as big as a fist, flashed at him from every corner of the room. Fabulous fortunes had been made in the diamond mines of South Africa. Why should he not be as successful as others? The romance of the Cullinan might be repeated, even surpassed.
Mebbee 'tis but some bird of the country bad end to it! or belike the man we're after, that has spied us, and is putting a game on us." "Bird!" exclaimed the man he had called Daniel Cullinan, as again the wail rang down from the hills. "Catch the bird can talk like yondhar, and I give ye lave to eat him and me off the same dish.
All these he stowed in a warped, mildewed remnant of a Gladstone bag, taken from a corner where a broken glass sign, "Leather Goods," lay among the rank confusion. "I guess I've got enough, now, for the first load," he judged, more excited than if he had chanced upon a blue-clay bed crammed with Cullinan diamonds. "It's a beginning, anyhow. Now for Beatrice!"
Suddenly the frank amazement had vanished from the faces of these men, and he found only the tense interest of an audience watching a clever juggler. For a time Mr. Schultze studied the Orloff duplicate, then passed it along to the experts. "Der grand Cullinan diamond weighs only two or d'ree pounds," he questioned in a tone of deep resignation. "Maybe you haf him in der backage, alretty?"
It was named the Cullinan, from one Tom Cullinan, who purchased the farm on which the Premier mine is located. Captain Wells, the manager of the Premier, one evening, after a burning hot day, when work had been suspended, strolled over to the mine, and, while partly walking and partly sliding down into the pit, noticed a gleam from a stone half-embedded in the earth.
The mine has already produced more than five hundred times what Cullinan paid for it and the surface has scarcely been scraped. You can see the natives working in its two huge holes which are not more than six hundred feet deep. It is still an open mine.
In the Premier Mine was found the Cullinan diamond, the largest ever discovered and which made the Koh-i-noor and all other fabled gems look like small pebbles. It weighed 3,200 karats and was insured for $2,500,000 when it was sent to England to be presented to King Edward. The Koh-i-noor, by the way, which was found in India only weighs 186 karats.
Take for instance the famous Cullinan, the wonder of the modern world. That gem was so huge that it was of no real value to the owners; so, unable to realize on it themselves, they induced the Transvaal government to buy it and present it to the King of England. We shall try to be a little more practical. Our first duty is to our stockholders.
Choosing an aromatic bed by the roadside where no prickly cactus thrust its way through the heather, I opened my wallet; pulled forth a sausage, a crust, and a skin of wine; supped; and stretched myself to sleep through the short summer night. "The howly Mother presarve us! Whist now, Daniel Cullinan, did ye'ver hear the like of it?"
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