was an ice machine which he started in partnership with another settler.
The produce they sold to their companions at an exorbitant price, but not
for long; whereafter the enterprising young man proceeded to buy some
plots of ground, of whose prolificacy in diamonds he had good reason to be
aware. It must be here remarked that Rhodes was never a poor man; he could
indulge in experiments as to his manner of investing his capital. And he
was not slow to take advantage of this circumstance. Kimberley was a wild
place at that time, and its distance from the civilised world, as well as
the fact that nothing was controlled by public opinion, helped some to
amass vast fortunes and put the weaker into the absolute power of the most
unscrupulous. It is to the honour of Rhodes that, however he might have
been tempted, he never listened to the advice which was given to him to do
what the others did, and to despoil the men whose property he might have
desired to acquire. He never gave way to the excesses of his daily
companions, nor accepted their methods of enriching themselves at top
speed so as soon to be able to return home with their gains.

From the first moment that he set foot on African soil Rhodes succumbed to
the strange charm the country offers for thinkers and dreamers. His
naturally languid temperament found a source of untold satisfaction in
watching the Southern Cross rise over the vast veldt where scarcely man's
foot had trod, where the immensity of its space was equalled by its
sublime, quiet grandeur. He liked to spend the night in the open air,
gazing at the innumerable stars and listening to the voice of the desert,
so full of attractions for those who have grown to discern somewhat of
Nature's hidden joys and sorrows. South Africa became for him a second
Motherland, and one which seemed to him to be more hospitable to his
temperament than the land of his birth. In South Africa he felt he could
find more satisfaction and more enjoyment than in England, whose
conventionalities did not appeal to his rebellious, unsophisticated heart.