the usual whisky-split at the Rand Club, and on all sides was to be
heard the old and well-known formula, "Here's luck," as the successful
speculator toasted an old friend or a newcomer.

However, to return to Johannesburg as we found it, after the 1895 boom.
Even then it seemed to me that for the first time in South Africa I saw
life. Cape Town, with its pathetic dullness and palpable efforts to keep
up a show of business; Kimberley, with its deadly respectability--both
paled in interest beside their younger sister, so light-hearted,
reckless, and enterprising. Before long, in spite of gloomy reflections
on the evils of gold-seeking, I fell under the fascination of what was
then a wonderful town, especially wonderful from its youth. The
ever-moving crowds which thronged the streets, every man of which
appeared to be full of important business and in a desperate hurry,
reminded one of the City in London. Smart carriages with well-dressed
ladies drove rapidly past, the shops were cunningly arranged with
tempting wares, and all this bustle and traffic was restored in little
over a week. A fortnight previously a revolution was impending and a
siege was looming ahead. Business had been at a complete standstill,
the shops and houses barred and barricaded, and many of the inhabitants
were taking a hurried departure; while bitterness, discord, and racial
feeling were rampant. Now, after a few days, that cosmopolitan and
rapidly changing population appeared to have buried their differences,
and the uninitiated would never have guessed the town had passed, and
was, indeed, still passing, through troublous times. Mr. Perkins,
however, was pessimistic, and told us appearances were misleading. He
rightly foresaw many lean years for those interested in the immediate
future of the Rand, though even he, perhaps, hardly realized how lean
those would become. Since those days much water has flown under the
bridge, and the trade of the town, not to speak of the mining industry,