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 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 laborer 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.

66

No," replied the doctor; "it is a creature well known, accurately described and classified, no sport of nature, but the offspring of colonial life and of the spirit of modern Europe. You have seen the Tasmanian devil -a furious beast that will devour its own species when wounded. The land-shark is even a worse devourer of his kind. You have seen how horses here will paw up and devour earth on which salt has been spilled?"

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.

"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 sight, on a whole host of places that must, in snorting close to our tent, where our host the nature of things, become populous and had poured out the salt water from pickled influential. Where a port was needed, they beef." had to repurchase the site from Stonecrop, at Well," continued the doctor," the land-cent. per cent. cost. Where a town should shark swallows up earth by acres and leagues; the wehr-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 shine of existence thousands of human crealaws. In a word, a land-shark is a thing tures, because there was no place for them which combines all the attributes of the incu- in the new and beautiful lands which God bus, the cannibal, the vampyre, and the choke- has revealed to the deserving uses of crowded damp. Where it lives nobody else can live. Europe. Imagine Battery Point, in HobartIt is the upas-tree become animated, and Town, with its magnificent situation on the walking over the southern world like a new estuary, and in the very centre of the new Frankenstein, producing stagnation, distor- metropolis, being bought by the father of the tion, death-in-life, and desolation wherever it present excellent termode for eight hundred arrives. It is the regrater and forestaller of pounds. Imagine what it is worth now, with the old world, against whose inhuman practice its sites, its buildings, its capabilities, nay, 80 many statutes have been enacted, thus its necessities every foot of earth precious turned up as the opponent of Providence in a as so much gold-dust. It is such startling, new sphere. It is the meal-worm of the shop 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, and melancholy chronicles of bloodshed.

"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,

"The least erected spirit that fell

From Heaven, for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts

"Adelaide is the only Australian colony which, warned by the vicinity of the prowlWere always downward bent,' ing monster, has guarded against him, and Stonecrop seemed only to see the earth, and has offered to the small capitalist the oppor-be anxious of its existence. Whether he ever tunity of securing small farms; and it has saw the sky, with its translucent and inspirseen its reward in a numerous, increasing, ing universe of suns and worlds, is doubtful, thriving, and happy rural population, capa- but certainly it never suggested to him vast ble already of sending out surplus produce to colonies of spiritual life, and all the sublime the incubus-ridden Victoria. But to my man. thoughts that claim for us kinship with the "Peter Stonecrop was one of my very first infinite. From time to time sad stories of patients, and he taught me one of my earliest hard dealings and oppressive acts towards lessons of caution. He came to me with a widows and orphans, over whose property he violent inflammation of the pleura. He doubt- had extended his mortgage net, reached the less selected me as a young, and, as he hoped, public, and of wondrous sums of money, a cheap practitioner. He actually passed on no more real use to him than so many oysterhis way a much nearer and very able medical shells. From the day that I restored him to man, and, in agonies which nothing but the a worthless life, he never came again under intensest avarice could have enabled him to my hands, and never did me the slightest endure, arrived at my door. Any other in-kindness. dividual 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.

of

"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

acute surveyor should have reserved them for | of the hut. The wretched man lay wide the public. He had possessed himself of the awake, watching with a keen look the dooronly site for quays and wharves, for the erec-way, and as I advanced, he lifted up his tion of a church, and for the supply of spring right hand, and said— water. He had managed to monopolize woodlands, just where their magnificent timber was at hand for exportation. If they wanted a market, they must re-buy it of him.

"That's you, doctor; but I'm better, we were in too great a hurry. You'll consider that, eh?'

"You are better, you think?"

"O, much better! my pains are gone. They were shocking, shocking. If I could but move my legs - but they seem to be bad. Yet what can ail them? I am better, much better.'

During this time I was feeling his pulse.

"From what the man could tell me, I perceived that the very complaint of which I had formerly relieved him had seized him once more in his old age. I believed his time was come, but I did not feel justified in refusing his call under such solemn circumstances, 66 where no other aid was to be got; I resolved, He watched me with a look which betrayed however, to make a stand for some fair remu- a far deeper anxiety than his words would neration this time. When the messenger indicate. I put down his arm quietly, and saw I hesitated to undertake the journey, he sate in solemn silence on a rude stool, which pulled from his pocket an open note. It was the woman brought me to his bedside. in Stonecrop's own scraggy, scrambling hand, now almost illegible from feebleness; but it offered large terms, which showed that he doubted of my coming. I wrote at the foot of the note that I accepted them, and made the messenger witness it. We went.

When we descended into this new township it was evening, almost dark, and there was a fog so thick that, as my guide said, 'You might almost hang your hat up on it.' We made our way through roods of mire a yard deep, ploughed up by bullock-teams; and piles of sawn timber, and trunks of felled trees, amongst blazing fires that blinded us, when near, and which gave us no help at a distance for the dense haze. In the midst of all the indescribable confusion, discomfort, and ugliness of such a nascent settlement, we found our great man domiciled in a mere shed, which had been erected by some sawyers. There he had cooked for himself; and, if one might jest on such a subject, had literally taken in and done for himself. The dampness of that low, hollow spot, and the incessant rains, had again produced a pleurisy.

"A kind-hearted woman, the wife of a drayman just by,ad gone in at his cries, and nursed him to the best of her ability. She described his agonies and moans as having been terrible; and when I said, but he is still now; ' she gave a look full of meaning,

and said:

"Yes, and to my thinking will soon be stiller.'

"I went in. A candle burnt on a deal box, besides the bedstead, the only furniture

"You think me better, doctor, don't you?' said the wasted old man with a ghastly and eager look. 'You must think so, I am so easy now.'

"Mr. Stonecrop,' I said, in a tone to prepare him as well as I could for the truth, you are now an old man, and no circumstance should take you by surprise, especially where it concerns your most important affairs. You are easy; thank God for it; but don't calculate upon that as delaying the crisis at which we must all arrive. I cannot flatter you with hopes of recovery.'

"The thin, prominent features of the dying man, which looked wan and bloodless before, at these words grew livid. His eyes glared on me with a fearful expression, their white gleaming with a strange largeness and glaziness. He clutched me by the sleeve with his big, bony hand, which yet seemed to retain an iron grasp.

"But you don't think I shall die soon? Not for some days, weeks, months? No, no, I cannot die. I have so much to do.'

"Let me speak plainly to you,' I added. 'If you have so much to do, you have little time to do it in. Your hours, nay, your minutes, are numbered.'

"At these words, he lay for a few moments, as if stunned. Then, dragging hard at my sleeve, he exclaimed, in a fearful, gasping voice, between a screech and a whisper

"No, no, doctor, you must not say that! You won't say that! Save me! Save me! and take half my land.'

"Not all the land on earth,' I said,