Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/312

 *tem of piece work, and some of the men make $1.25 a day. The eight-hour system prevails, but the system of team work is such that all the men work steadily; the company sees to it that there are no shirkers. So the De Beers company has the services of excellent workmen at an average cost of eighty-two cents a day. There is a modern hospital in the compound, and men who are injured are treated free, and, in addition, receive their usual wages while laid up. The compound is much cleaner than an ordinary negro village, and many of the men remain with the company for years There is a good deal of water in the Kimberley mines. In one of them, 25,000 gallons an hour is pumped without trouble from a depth of 1,500 feet The blue dirt is hauled from the mine to the field, where it is exposed to the weather for a year, in iron cars holding about a ton each. The cars are pulled by an endless cable, and one of the sights of Kimberley is these cars going and coming without attendance on a double-track railway two or three miles long. The cars run in bunches of three, about twenty yards apart, and reminded me of ants coming and going When the blue dirt is ready to be treated, it is hauled to the washing-mills in the same cars, and in the same way. At the washing-mills there is a large residue known to contain no diamonds, and this is carried to the top of the dump and thrown away, and thus are formed the gray mounds seen around the town of Kimberley The Transvaal government has an interest in the Premier diamond mine near Pretoria, and gets sixty per cent of its profits. The government's share amounts to two and a half million dollars a year.