of the old world, against whose inhuman
practice so many statutes have been enacted,
thus turned up as the opponent of Providence
in a new sphere. It is the meal-worm of the
shop converted by what it feeds on into the
hungry caterpillar of these lands.

"I have to-day stood by the death-bed of a
primate of this class. Peter Stonecrop was
one of the earliest inhabitants of this colony,
and his death will make a sensation. Of his
beginning, which must have been tolerably
obscure, I know nothing; but he was an
illiterate man, and sordid from the first
known of him. He got a large grant of land
here, when grants were going as freely as the
winds or the clouds. He never cultivated it.
He bought more land—cheap, dog cheap—
but he never cultivated it. What he got he
kept, for he spent nothing. A hut scarcely
fit for a labourer was his sole abode. He
never could afford to marry. He was in this
respect more penurious than Long Clarke, a
congener, and the prince of land-sharks.

"Peter Stonecrop is little behind his
celebrated chief, I mean in accumulation of lands.
Though to-day he possesses but some six feet
of earth, yesterday he was lord of fifty thousand
acres. In one respect his influence has
been more mischievous than Clarke's; for he
has contrived to pitch, with a singular
foresight, on a whole host of places that must, in
the nature of things, become populous and
influential. Where a port was needed, they
had to repurchase the site from Stonecrop, at
cent. per cent. cost. Where a town should
spring up, the purchases of Stonecrop stood
in the way, and turned the tide of building
into a far worse position. Where families
longed to settle, and saw in imagination fertile
farms and happy homes, Stonecrop had put
his hand on the waste, and a waste it
remained. Thus have this man and his
congeners, gone on obstructing settlement,
distorting progress, pushing back from the warm
sunshine of existence thousands of human
creatures, because there was no place for
them in the new and beautiful lands which
God has revealed to the deserving uses of
crowded Europe. Imagine Battery Point, in
Hobart Town, with its magnificent situation
on the estuary, and in the very centre of the
new metropolis, being bought by the father
of the present excellent termode for eight
hundred pounds. Imagine what it is worth
now, with its sites, its buildings, its capabilities,
nay, its necessities—every foot of earth
precious as so much gold-dust. It is such
startling, prominent, exciting spectacles, that
have created the tribe of voracious, yet
indigesting land-sharks. But it is in Victoria
that the race and the mischief have at length
culminated. There, the in-rushing torrents
of gold-seekers have found the squatter and
the land-shark in a coalition terrible as an
antarctic frost. What the one was reluctantly
compelled to let go, the other seized. The
land-shark was before the population, but
certain of its arrival, purchasing up large
tracts when they were to be had. Wherever
the government offered modicums of land to
the clamorous public, the land-shark was
there, and outbid them, because he could
wait, and knew that the higher the pressure
of population the higher the price. You are
no strangers to the outcries on that side the
Straits for land; the indignant remonstrance
and the reflux of despairing emigrants from
those fair and fertile shores, where the
squatter and the land-shark reign—the lords
of a monopoly that amazes all wise men, and
fills the valleys and prairies of America with
millions on millions of people meant by
Providence for the planters and forefathers of a
glorious England of the south. You will yet
hear, if this unholy alliance be not speedily
cancelled, of woful tempests of vainly
repressed passion, and melancholy chronicles of
bloodshed.

"Adelaide is the only Australian colony
which, warned by the vicinity of the prowling
monster, has guarded against him, and has
offered to the small capitalist the opportunity
of securing small farms; and it has seen
its reward in a numerous, increasing, thriving,
and happy rural population, capable already
of sending out surplus produce to the incubus-
ridden Victoria. But to my man.

"Peter Stonecrop was one of my very first
patients, and he taught me one of my earliest
lessons of caution. He came to me with a
violent inflammation of the pleura. He
doubtless selected me, as a young, and, as he
hoped, a cheap practitioner. He actually
passed on his way a much nearer and very
able medical man, and in agonies which
nothing but the intensest avarice could have
enabled him to endure, arrived at my door.
Any other individual would have sent for a
medical man to come to him, but his
penurious soul would not allow him such a luxury.
I opened my door, and saw him seated on a
white, bony steed. I involuntarily thought
of Death upon the pale horse; such was his
ghastly and tortured aspect.

"I took him in, doctored, nursed, and kept
him for a month. As he grew nearly well,
he began to talk to me of my practice and
prospects. Said he knew it was anxious and
up-hill work for a young man in a new place.
I candidly confessed it was, and he sympathised
—as I thought, feelingly—with me.
He frequently shook his head seriously,
muttered, 'Yes; hard work, very hard work:
but we must help one another. My good
doctor, let me know what I owe you. You've
been very kind to me, and I hope I shall
show myself sensible of it.'

"My impresion was that, he meant to make
me some handsome present—something
correspondent to his ample fortune, and the
services I had rendered him. I therefore was
careful to charge him as moderately as
possible. I felt bound to rely on his generosity.
He took his bill, paid me exactly to the farthing,