The Diary of a South African. By M. ?L Steyn.
(Cape Town: J. 0. Jute. 5s. ed.)—This unpretentious autobiography contains interesting chapters on Kimberley and Johannesburg in the early days. Mr. Steyn was born at the Cape, and, after spending three years on a Boer farm as English tutor, went to the Diamond Fields in 1870. He found very few diamonds, but he bad better luck as a storekeeper, despite a bank failure which compelled him to sell up and start afresh. He witnessed the trivial " rebellion" which forced the Government to reform the local administration. He says that Rhodes had a wonderful memory for details. In the early "eighties," as he confesses, the author
veld," but his friends at Cape Town would not lend him money to buy a second " stand " or town-plot, asserting that the place was " a fraud." He gives some curious instances of the rapid rise of values in Johanneenarg, and of equally rapid falls in other places. Chance seems to have played no small part in the making of Rand fortunes. Mr. Steyn is a keen Progressive. He has no patience with the backward farmers who think, or profess to think, that dipping sheep must be wrong because it is not men- tioned in the Bible. But he seldom touches on polities. He has a keen sense of humour. In his reminiscences of a Continental tour, he has attributed to Cologne the experiences that Stras- bourg had in 1870.
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