of our fathers in the island? The Musquito por. But the dose was too strong; it procame down upon them with the enraged na-duced violent sickness, and the man, relieved, tives, and Michael Howe and his gang spread arose in a while, and marched on. terror from the Tamar to the Derwent. There is a story - a wonderful one- told of those times, which few who hear it will believe: yet it is quite true, and has been mentioned by West in his history of the colony. 66 "At the time when a heavy sum was offered for the capture of Howe, alive or dead, and when the desperate fellow was so hunted and laid wait for that he was irritated to a state of deadly ferocity, a convict happened to make his escape. He bolted to the woods in nothing but the bright yellow suit which the so-called canary-birds, the convicts, wear. He had made his way up the country, by venturing to approach shepherds and solitary stockmen, who were often of the class, and actuated by the fellow-feeling which makes 'wondrous kind.' From them he had procured damper enough to carry him on, and at length, arriving in the mountains, he encountered the celebrated bandit, at the head of a gang of his desperate followers. "Eh, mate!' said Howe, 'whither away?' "To join the bushrangers,' said the man; 'I have made my escape.' "After traveling for some hours, taking, as well as he knew, a direction widely differ ent from that of the bushrangers, to his own and their astonishment, he found himself once more crossing their path. "What!' exclaimed they, 'are you not dead?' "The man fell on his knees, and prayed vehemently for his life. It was useless. The choice of sword or pistol was again offered him, and as he continued to implore for mercy, crack went Howe's pistol, and the victim fell motionless on the ground. "But he was not yet killed. After a time he recovered consciousness, felt the top of his head smarting and burning terrifically, and his eyes blinded by blood. But his bodily strength and feeling of soundness was wholly undiminished. He rose, wiped the blood from his eyes, washed his head at a pool, and found that the ball had merely grazed his skull. Binding up his head with his handkerchief, he once more set forward, trusting this time to steer clear of the merciless crew of bushrangers. But no such good fortune attended him. After marching some miles through a most laborious mountaintrack in a deep inlet valley, he again saw to his horror the robber troop approaching. It was too late to conceal himself; they already saw him; and he heard distinctly the shout of wonder that they raised on perceiving him. "That won't pass, my friend,' said Howe, pouncing savagely on the man. This is a stale dodge; — won't do here; it has been tried too often. Rather tempting, eh? that price on my head. But we've settled all that. The man that comes here, dies; and so all 's safe. Mate, here's a choice for "What!' exclaimed the terrible Howe, you; - we don't wish to be too arbitary.' still alive? Will neither poison nor bullet The cutlass, the pistol, or the contents of destroy thee? Why, thou art a cat-o'this little vial;' producing one from his mountain, with not nine, but any number waistcoat-pocket. of lives at the devil's need. Art thou man, or ghost, or fiend?' "The poor fellow, thunderstruck with astonishment and terror, begged piteously for his life, protested over and over his innocence of any treason, and his desire to join them. In vain. The savage outlaw bade him cease his whining, and make his choice, or they would at once choose for him. The poor wretch selected the poison as the least appalling. They saw him swallow it off, wished him a comfortable doze, and disappeared in the wood. The potion began to take instantaneous effect. The man sank down, overcome with drowsiness, on a stump, and felt himself falling into an overpowering stu "The poor wretch once more, and still more movingly, pleaded for his life. 'He "What had he done?' he asked. wanted only to join them, and he would be their slave, their fag, their packhorse, their forlorn hope in any desperate cases-anything, so that they only let him live.' "Live!' exclaimed the barbarous leader; live! Why, thou livest in spite of me! Neither fire nor physic harm thee! Nay, I would kill thee, if it were only to see what it takes to do it. I have a curiosity to know whether thou canst be killed, or whether thou art not the Wandering Jew, or Old | those days of unnatural history, natural hisNick himself.' With these words, listening tory, of course, was not. Only think of no more to the tears and entreaties of the stumbling on Musquito or Howe, who may be man than if he had been a hyena, he devoted called the Tasmanian Alexander the Great; him to the infernal powers in familiar lan- for, literally guage, and, stabbing him with his cutlass, said, 'Take that!' "The man struggled violently on the ground for a few seconds, and then lay still on the sand. "Thrice he fought his battles o'er, And thrice he slew the slain.'” sole cause of my encountering any danger, or simultaneously ex "Fie, Fritz!" said the doctor, laughing. "Yet, even in my early days, here I botan"That's a settler, I think,' said the out-ized and entomologized. And that was the law, whose hand had executed worse horrors than even that, since he had been hunted and bidden for by government; burning secluded families in their own huts at midnight, and making solitary travellers run a race for their lives, as a mark for the rifles of his men. If the fellow comes to life again,' he said coolly, 'I must get his secret, for it is very likely to be useful to me.' Wiping his cutlass, first on some long grass that he pulled up, and then on his coat-sleeve, he coolly marched away with his crew." "And that certainly must have been a settler," said the professor. A serious cloud passed over the worthy doctor's features, and in a different tone he added-"Yes! In all my rough and solitary rides in this insular depot of excited ruffians; in all my night wanderings, when called, as must be the case, to often distant abodes, in the very worst parts of the island; I have always found my profession and my errand an infallible safeguard. Whenever I have been stopped by outlawed fellows, whose very "By no means," added the doctor. "After name and fame all over the island were a a time the convict returned to consciousness. horror, to their demand of Who goes Fearfully weak, he was tormented with a there?' my reply, 'The Doctor,' brought burning thirst; but was still alive. With the instant rejoinder-'All right! Go, in much effort, and various faintings, he managed God's name, doctor!' Nay, these very felto crawl in the direction of a stream that lows have, on many an occasion, been my ran riotously and sonorously down the rocky guides, conducting me by ways known only valley, and there quenched his burning thirst to themselves, confident that I would never in the deliciously cold water. Again ex- betray them. To them I owe a knowledge hausted, he sank back on the bank; and of passes and short cuts through these hills would no doubt have perished, had not a that no man besides is acquainted with. I stockman come in quest of stray cattle. He have often received refreshments from these removed him to his hut, having first bound fierce outcasts of humanity, when I was ready up the wound in his chest; and, after a long to faint with exhaustion; more than once I period of illness and debility, the man was have even slept all night in their rude huts once more well, and determined to return, in the mountains, feeling the profoundest seand deliver himself up to the authorities at curity in guards who had the repute of being Hobart-Town, where, you may be sure, his destitute of all feelings but the most diabolical story and the confirmatory scars upon him I have attended them in their sickness or their excited an immense sensation." wounds, and I have seen and heard revelations by the death-beds of robbers and murderers that would draw tears from a stone. O ! if the world did but know what glorious facul ties and feelings might be cultivated in youth, in the poorest and most abject of our population -toads and deformed reptiles as they afterwards appear to us, yet in whose heads and hearts God has originally deposited the precious jewel of a great and capable nature "But how could the man survive a thrust through the body?" said the professior, in amazement. "It was a mere case of loss of blood," replied the doctor; "the weapon had luckily passed between the ribs without touching any vital part, and the man had swooned from agony and hæmorrhage." "Horrid times!" ejaculated Fritz. "In many a man, who has come hither leprous with crime, and venomous as a trodden serpent, would have remained at home to adorn society, and to accelerate its progress towards higher knowledge and a nobler standard of opinion!" "But what was the exception?" "This: I had but little to do, and I made long rambles, devoting those attentions to insects which were not required by patients. In one of these, I entered a new township in a remote situation, and stopped for the night at an inn still but partly furnished. I observed that my bedroom had no lock, but that was too common to give me any concern. But, having deposited in this room when I had gone up, on entering, to wash my hands, a brace of pistols, and a small morrocco case in which I carried my insects, I observed that these articles had been removed and replaced in a very different manner. I examined the pistols, and found, to my surprise, that they had been both unloaded, and that water had been poured into them. This gave me a strange sensation, and it occurred to me that my insect case had been supposed to contain money, and that there was a design to rob me. It was too late to quit the house without notice, and without running greater risk outside than in the room itself. I carefully wiped dry and reloaded the pistols, drew with as little noise as possible a heavy chest of drawers against the door, and threw myself down in my clothes, anxiously waiting for the anticipated attack. It came. About midnight, I heard something at the door-force applied to push back the obstruction. My candle had burnt out; but I exclaimed, 'Who's there?' "O! are you awake?' said a man's voice, which I supposed that of the landlord; I want to come in for some bed linen in the drawers a guest has just arrived, and we can't do without it.' "Mein Gott!" exclaimed the two German gentlemen, recurring in their excitement to their native tongue, though they usually spoke English like Englishmen. "Yes," continued the doctor; "he fell, I heard a groan. I could see nothing, but I heard a great running on the stairs, and low, suppressed exclamations of horror, and whisperings. Then all was still, and I remained in a condition which you may imagine, till morning. No one came near the chamber. At daybreak I pushed away the drawers, looked out, expecting to see a frightful stain of blood, but all was clean- the floor had been carefully scoured. "I descended. There was no one to be seen but a girl, who looked at me with a sort of stupid wonder. I asked what I owed, paid it to her, and walked away. No one appeared to oppose or to question me. It seemed all like a horrible dream. As I ascended the village, a man began tolling a bell which hung in a tree by a new wooden chapel. I asked what that meant. "It is the passing-bell,' said the man, 'for the landlord down yonder, who died suddenly in the night.' "The words struck me like an actual blow; I went on-no one pursued me- no one ever afterwards spoke or seemed to know of the affair. A short time ago I was in that neighborhood. The place is become a great town; a new family is in the inn, which is one of extensive business. I ventured to ask if such a tradition did not exist? No one had heard a syllable about it." "You had a narrow escape, doctor," said his wondering friends. "Ay; and what would I now give if I had but told that dishonest landlord that I had discovered his trick, and that my pistols were once more loaded. It was his convietion that they were empty which made him secure." "I told him nobody should come in on any "No doubt of it," replied the professor, account till morning. The man swore that" and enabled you to rid the country of a he must and would, and proceeded to push monster who would have victimized others if violently at the door. On this I started up he even failed with you." and cried, 'Desist! or take the consequences; "That is my only comfort," said the doctor whoever comes in here is a dead man!' But musingly; "but we must soon to bed, and bethe man—and he was a huge, brawny fellow fore I can do that, I must relieve my mind of - swore dreadful oaths that he would come another scene, which I can only effect by givin; and, as he furiously thrust open the door, ing it words, and thus insure my sleep. I I fired." have just witnessed the end of one of those extraordinary criminals which it requires the air of Europe and that of new colonies combined, to produce." "What criminal can that be?" asked the naturalists, their attention excited by the expectation of some novelty in their own region of inquiry. 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 "It is the land-shark," said the doctor. obscure, I know nothing; but he was an illit"The land-shark!" said the eager expect-erate man, and sordid from the first known ants, laughing; "that must be a lusus na- of him. He got a large grant of land here, turæ, a nondescript indeed." when grants were going as freely as the winds "No," replied the doctor; "it is a crea-or the clouds. He never cultivated it. He ture well known, accurately described and bought more land cheap, dog cheap — but classified, no sport of nature, but the offspring he never cultivated it. What he got he kept, of colonial life and of the spirit of modern for he spent nothing. A hut scarcely fit for Europe. You have seen the Tasmanian devila laborer was his sole abode. He never could -a furious beast that will devour its own afford to marry. He was in this respect more species when wounded. The land-shark is penurious than Long Clarke, a congener, and even a worse devourer of his kind. You the prince of land-sharks. have seen how horses here will paw up and devour earth on which salt has been spilled?” -- "Peter Stonecrop is little behind his celebrated chief, I mean in accumulation of lands. Though to-day he possesses but some six feet "Yes," said Fritz, merrily; "I know that of earth, yesterday he was lord of fifty thouto my cost; for many a time have I had to sand acres. In one respect his influence has rise and rush forth in the night, and, un-been more mischievous than Clarke's; for he dressed, chase away into the bush wretched has contrived to pitch, with a singular forehorses who were champing, and pawing, and snorting close to our tent, where our host had poured out the salt water from pickled beef." sight, 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. "Well," continued the doctor, "the landshark swallows up earth by acres and leagues; the webr-wolf of Scandinavian legends never had such a capacity for the marvellous in deglutition. Australia has produced no lion, tiger, grizzly bear, or such ferocious monsters, but it has produced the land-shark, and that is a monstrum horrendum worse than all of them put together. It is worse, because it "Thus have this man and his congeners wears the shape of a man; and, with a face gone on, obstructing settlement, distorting as innocent, as meek, and placid as a manti-progress, pushing back from the warm suncora or a syren, takes shelter under human laws. In a word, a land-shark is a thing which combines all the attributes of the incubus, the cannibal, the vampyre, and the chokedamp. Where it lives nobody else can live. It is the upas-tree become animated, and walking over the southern world like a new Frankenstein, producing stagnation, distortion, death-in-life, and desolation wherever it arrives. It is the regrater and forestaller 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 shine 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 HobartTown, 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 cre ated the tribe of voracious yet indigesting "I took him in, doctored, nursed, and land-sharks. But it is in Victoria that the kept him for a month. As he grew nearly race and the mischief have at length culmi- well, he began to talk to me of my practice nated. There, the in-rushing torrents of gold- and prospects. Said he knew it was anxious seekers have found the squatter and the land- and up-hill work for a young man in a new shark in a coalition terrible as an antarctic place. I candidly confessed it was, and he frost. What the one was reluctantly com- sympathized as I thought, feelingly - with pelled to let go, the other seized. The land- me. He frequently shook his head seriously, shark was before the population, but, certain muttered, Yes; hard work, very hard of its arrival, purchasing up large tracts when work; but we must help one another. My they were to be had. Wherever the govern- good doctor, let me know what I owe you. ment offered modicums of land to the clam-You 've been very kind to me, and I hope I orous public, the land-shark was there, and shall show myself sensible of it.' 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,The 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 on the pale horse; such was his ghastly and tortured aspect. "My impression was that he meant to make me some handsome present-something corresponding 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, called for his horse, and rode off. The land-shark and the miser are one. "Twenty years have flown since then. Old age has only bent his iron frame nearer to the earth which held his soul. If ever there was a thing of the earth, earthy, it was Stonecrop. Like Mammon, least erected spirit that fell From Heaven, for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent,' Stonecrop seemed only to see the earth, and be anxious of its existence. Whether he ever saw the sky, with its translucent and inspiring universe of suns and worlds, is doubtful, but certainly it never suggested to him vast colonies of spiritual life, and all the sublime thoughts that claim for us kinship with the infinite. From time to time sad stories of hard dealings and oppressive acts towards widows and orphans, over whose property he had extended his mortgage net, reached the public, and of wondrous sums of money, of no more real use to him than so many oystershells. From the day that I restored him to a worthless life, he never came again under my hands, and never did me the slightest kindness. "Yet, the other day came a messenger with hot haste to call me to him. Stonecrop, he said, was dying, or feared so. A new settlement was laid out on the western coast, the vultures of speculation had already flocked there, and Stonecrop was put in the field. He had pounced on various lots just when an |
