and worthless as jewels. Now I, you know, have given up my life to
this problem--given my life to it.

"I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I
was seventeen, and now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it
might take all the thought and energies of a man for ten years, or
twenty years, but, even if it did, the game was still worth the
candle. Suppose one to have at last just hit the right trick
before the secret got out and diamonds became as common as coal,
one might realize millions. Millions!"

He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone
hungrily. "To think," said he, "that I am on the verge of it all,
and here!

"I had," he proceeded, "about a thousand pounds when I was
twenty-one, and this, I thought, eked out by a little teaching,
would keep my researches going. A year or two was spent in study,
at Berlin chiefly, and then I continued on my own account. The
trouble was the secrecy. You see, if once I had let out what I was
doing, other men might have been spurred on by my belief in the
practicability of the idea; and I do not pretend to be such a
genius as to have been sure of coming in first, in the case of a
race for the discovery. And you see it was important that if I
really meant to make a pile, people should not know it was an
artificial process and capable of turning out diamonds by the ton.
So I had to work all alone. At first I had a little laboratory,
but as my resources began to run out I had to conduct my
experiments in a wretched unfurnished room in Kentish Town, where
I slept at last on a straw mattress on the floor among all my