vast as his own fancy and imagination. He was always dreaming, always lost
in thoughts which were wandering far beyond his actual surroundings,
carrying him into regions where the common spirit of mankind seldom
travelled. He was born for far better things than those which he
ultimately attained, but he did not belong to the century in which he
lived; his ruthless passions of anger and arrogance were more fitted for
an earlier and cruder era. Had he possessed any disinterested friends
capable of rousing the better qualities that slumbered beneath his
apparent cynicism and unscrupulousness, most undoubtedly he would have
become the most remarkable individual in his generation. Unfortunately, he
found himself surrounded by creatures absolutely inferior to himself,
whose deficiencies he was the first to notice, whom he despised either for
their insignificance or for their mental and moral failings, but to whose
influence he nevertheless succumbed.

When Cecil Rhodes arrived at Kimberley he was a mere youth. He had come to
South Africa in quest of health and because he had a brother already
settled there, Herbert Rhodes, who was later on to meet with a terrible
fate. Cecil, if one is to believe what one hears from those who knew him
at the time, was a shy youth, of a retiring disposition, whom no one could
ever have suspected would develop into the hardy, strong man he became in
time. He was constantly sick, and more than once was on the point of
falling a victim of the dreaded fever which prevails all over South Africa
and then was far more virulent in its nature than it is to-day. Kimberley
at that time was still a vast solitude, with here and there a few
scattered huts of corrugated iron occupied by the handful of colonists.
Water was rare: it is related, indeed, that the only way to get a wash was
to use soda water.

The beginning of Rhodes' fortune, if we are to believe what we are told,