on ruefully as the funds melt away. There is
but a poor chance of its lasting out to their
turn; a still poorer of there being a margin
over for that hapless puisne incumbrancer of
all, the owner. Therefore do they battle with
one another for priority, and strive to trample
their way through the crowd to the front. But
one week is allowed on an average for this
struggle, and the cloud of vultures (birds with
mortgages, judgments, and other charges, in
their talons) who are wheeling in the air in
disorderly circles, are at last allowed to swoop in
their turn and each to carry off his morsel.
There are some thirty or forty proprietors now
over the fair lands of Tumbletowers, and we,
no longer a famished mortgagee, have returned
to our own country with a cheque for principal
and interest in our pocket.

Remains now, to sum up the labours of these
vigorous backwoodsmen, who, with their stout
legal axes, have entered into the bush country
and cleared whole miles of incumbered districts.
From the day of the fatal auto da fé, when
unhappy James Balfe, Esquire, of Southpark,
headed the procession in his San Benito shirt,
on that twenty-second of February, eighteen
hundred and fifty, down to the last day of sacrifice in
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight, it is registered
that nearly two millions of acres, or about one-
seventh of the available surface of the country,
has been disposed of by public auction. Nearly
five-and-twenty millions sterling has been paid
into the hands of the unflinching triumvirs, who
nicely weighed and determined conflicting claims,
representing a sum of some four-and-twenty
millions. Nearly four thousand petitions from
creditors have been presented, praying for a sale;
eight thousand estates have been brought to the
hammer; and some four thousand titles have been
scrutinised by the triumvirs themselves. For
this hodman's work was part of their laborious
round of duty; and each personally waded
through those dirty waves of vellum and faded
yellow paper on which the true title to an estate
usually drifts down. Indeed, it is a curious
feature in the whole proceeding, that many
who protested against the new innovation, and
forecast innumerable dangers, own that their
predictions were falsified by the special and
exceptional character of its administrators—by
the jealous care and untiring watchfulness of the
three commissioners. The old-fashioned Chancery
Dilly rumbled on at a slow walk, and was
ten years distributing a million sterling. The new
legislative engine dashes by, express, and scatters
five-and-twenty millions within the same space.

Many wise seers and prophets, and some
hopeful men, went sadly astray in their
vaticinations. There was to be a complete shifting
of proprietary, a fierce irruption of moneyed
Saxon bone and sinew; and that curious
surgical process, the opening of an Hibernian
artery and the introduction by mechanical
agency of a foreign ichor, would be performed
satisfactorily. The result astounded even those
who looked with apprehension on the certain
extinguishment of a brave and faithful
peasantry. Out of eight thousand five hundred
and fifty purchasers, it was found that only
three hundred and twenty-four were of the
foreign element: the overwhelming balance of
eight thousand two hundred and twenty-five,
being natives. Thus, too, was in part remedied
what was pointed out by the Devon Commission
as the most fatal hindrance to the advancement
of the country: the absence of a middle-class
proprietary with small holdings. It was noticed
that the foreign element introduced itself early
in the first rush, but afterwards wholly
disappeared. Poor feeble Dame Chancery it was
still destined, even indirectly, to persecution; for
it has been ascertained that in the infancy of
the new court, when it had hardly reached to
the two hundred and thirtieth petition, no fewer
than four hundred equity suits stopped short,
stricken with paralytic seizure, and collapsed.

It was hardly to be expected that these new
captains, strange to their work, could have got
through the thick of this mingle-mangle of figures,
acres, maps, surveying, conveyancing, law, and
auctioneering, without some casualties. Some bad
legal seamanship might reasonably be looked for,
and handsomely extenuated. It was no fault of
theirs, that in that glutting of the market, in
the earlier days, land should have gone off at
miserable sacrifices. There were instances of
estates sold at ten years' purchase, which, three
or four years later, fetched twenty-five: to the
luckless owners' mortification. There was
actually a tradition of one accursed domain
which, under some unholy blight, brought but
one year's purchase! The rental was set down
at six hundred pounds, and it fetched but six
hundred pounds! But on scrutiny it proved
that this was an airy impalpable rental, which,
being drawn from miserable paupers and
shattered tenements, on which, instead of roofs,
lay a load of hopeless arrears, shrank into a
very mean rental indeed, more than handsomely
represented by that one year's purchase. There
was something like abuse in that instance
pointed to by Lord St. Leonards, where a
creditor for eleven pounds contrived to have an
estate of six hundred a year sold for his
demand. In that legend we may justly suspect
misapprehension, or varnish of some kind. As
to the law, such captains were safe enough;
but how was it with them in that matter of
surveying—that manipulation of nearly three
million acres? Judge Hargrave (the young man
whom nobody knew) owns penitentially to some
failing of this nature. "In one or two
instances," he says, "we encroached a little on the
adjoining property, principally bog; but the
compensation was so trifling and ridiculous that the
injured party usually gave up the point." A few
roods of bog, astray in some three million of acres!

Some three or four cases of greater hardship
stand against the commissioners. Three or four
persons have suffered out of—take it to be a
million others, whom they have dealt with. A
not very heavy per-centage. The wisest law is
but a beneficent Juggernaut, which must crush
some few victims.