pounds each. To maintain this value was the aim of the holders of the town lands; to lower it, or to create a rival field of profit and speculation, was the object of the others. Every person who landed in the colony with capital, ridiculed the high prices which the town land had acquired, and expressed a determination to abstain from purchasing any of it; but in a week or two the new comers contracted the prevailing epidemic, whose symp toms became manifest in the purchase of an allotment at the price which had at first seemed so preposterous. Bullock-drivers were known to have become wealthy, in an incredibly short space of time, through the rapidly in creasing value of their town sections. It was argued, that if land were worth upwards of 20,000Z. per acre in Sydney, it must be cheap at 5000Z. in the capital of South Australia; and thus the price of town lands continued, to use the pithy language of Sam Slick, “ to shoot a-head,” to the infinite satisfaction of its owners ; and it became the prevailing impression among all classes, that to pur chase town land, and to build houses upon it, to be let or sold to the new comers, who were pouring into the colony in a continuous stream, was the high road to fortune. An enterprising gentleman of my acquaintance, having lost his vessel on the coast of South Australia, and with it all his personal property, with the exception of a cask of rum, saved from the wreck, contrived, in a few months, to re-establish his fortune, in a manner which will illustrate the advantages sometimes obtained by ju diciously speculating in the town lands of new colonies. Nothing daunted by the calamity which had befallen him, Captain F- opened a small establishment of that description to which the name of “ Hurricane House”