faculties and professors, and the importation at the same time of independent influences, more observable than in the Debating Societies. All the world over academic debating societies are, I suppose, very much the same; and to describe the debating societies of Edinburgh University would therefore be useless, unless it were to be done with very ample local illustration, and plenty of personal anecdote. The very great importance of the debating societies as a non-official part of the apparatus of this University deserves, however, to be noted. In addition to the famous "Speculative Society," of which all the world has heard from Lockhart, Lord Cockburn, and others, and which still existed, though in a more remote state of connexion with the actual life of the University than in its palmy days, there were I know not how many societies, either general or special, all flourishing, and all having their weekly or fortnightly evenings of meeting within the walls of the college. There was the "Theological Society," which had existed for nearly a century; there was "the Diagnostic Society," some thirty years old; there was "the Dialectic Society," also of considerable age; there was Metaphysical Society," recently founded by the more prominent of the young Hamiltonians; and there were other societies, medical and legal. You might be an active member of two or three of these societies, if you were so inclined'; and, though the societies were not then associated in a federal body as they have been since, there were occasional meetings of several societies in common for great conjunct debates by their assembled champions. It would be easy to make fun of my recollections of these gatherings, and there was absurdity enough in many of them. But to this day I have known nothing of the sort better on the whole, and it remains a question with me whether the excitement and mutual invigoration afforded by them were not that agency in the university-life of Edinburgh which gave zest and unity to all the rest. Oh, what essays, on all things human and divine, we read and

"the

heard; what criticisms, complimentary or sarcastic, we pronounced on the essays; what traits of character, what comicalities, what revelations of unfledged power came forth in our debates; how we did go at the question whether Mahomet was an impostor; how some of us defended the execution of Charles I., but others did not see their way to regicide consistently with the Decalogue; how we did anticipate the Parliament in abolishing the Corn Laws! And then, when we turned out late at night, flushed with our oratory, to take our several ways homewards in groups, how the rhetorical mood and the nimbleness of invention would last, and what laughs and flashes of wit there would be along the lines of the lamp-posts! I remem

ber, as if it were but last night, the going home of one such group. We had passed the South Bridge on our way from the University, and had entered Princes Street and turned westward. There was among us one whom we all respected in a singular degree. Tall, strong-boned, and granite-headed, he was the student whom Sir William Hamilton himself had signalized and honoured as already a sterling thinker, and the strength of whose logic, when you grappled with him in argument, seemed equalled only by the strength of his hand-grip when you met him or bade him good-bye, or by the manly integrity and nobleness of his character. He was also the gentlest and kindliest of human beings. But, suddenly, when we were in that part of Princes Street pavement which is nearly opposite to the site of the Scott monument, there appeared before us, in the dim light of approaching midnight, a spectacle which strangely moved him. It was one of those rotatory imps-the first of his order, I should think, in Edinburghwho earn pennies by tumbling head over heels with rapidity five or six times continuously. To discern precisely what it was at that time of night, especially as the phenomenon was then a rare one, was exceedingly difficult. Maddened, as it appeared, by the sight of the revolving creature, our friend rushed at

him, hitting at him with his umbrella, and sternly interrogating-"What are you?" Calling up from the pavement, "I'm a wheel, I'm a wheel," the thing continued to revolve, fast as the Manx Arms set a-whirling, full half the distance between two lamp-posts. Unsatisfied by the information, and still pursuing the thing, and striking at it with the

hook of his umbrella, ran our friend, while we gazed on with amazement. A great awe fell upon us; and even now, when I think of debating societies, or of life itself, I seem to see the rotatory imp in the lamp-lit darkness of Princes Street pursued by the phrenzied metaphysician.

"Athenæus, in his 'Deipnosophists,' tells us that the ancient Carians used, at the annual festivals of Venus, to crown with rosemary the luckiest man of his year in front of the principal temple. For public ceremonies of this kind we are not wholly unprovided. Rome had her Forum, Athens her Areopagus, Corinth her Sisipheum ; so Palmerston has her Government Block. Let Mr. James Burton, the Port Romilly blacksmith, be carried up there; let him be crowned with a wreath of Kennedya; for assuredly such fortunes as his, scarce ever befell one of the Audax Iapeti genus before. A discovery has transpired, in the fertile and salubrious district of Port Romilly, which promises to elevate Palmerston into one of the principal commercial emporiums of the civilized globe. The bullock'shide of Dido which first traced the walls of the future Carthage will in future go down to posterity with the theodolite of Captain Snig, the gallant and intelligent engineer officer who first traced the streets of Palmerston; and the venerable and vivacious statesman whose name it bears must be content to share

AUSTIN ELLIOT," "RAVENSHOE," ETC.

futurity with the city to which he stood in loco parentis. 'Oh, si angulus iste!' have we been exclaiming, ever since the foundation of the colony. We have been blessed with fertile lands, with full-fed rivers, with boundless forests, with numberless flocks and herds. We have made a material progress greater than that of any nation in ancient or modern times. One thing had been denied to us. One thing made us jealous of South Australia, to which colony we are in all other respects, physical and moral, so vastly superior. We wanted mineral wealth-and we have got it. Yes. It may be attempted to be denied, but it is true. A Cornish miner, named Trevittick, has discovered that the whole of the Cape Wilberforce mountain is in an eminent degree cupriferous. In Burnt Hut Gully, purchased last week for twelve hundred and eighty pounds by Mr. James Burton, an enormous outcrop of pure metal itself takes place, similar to those on Lake Superior. On the next lot, Morepark Gully, bought at the same time, for the same price, by the Hon. Mr. Dawson, a small quarry, which has been opened, exhibits a mass of blue and green carbonates, eighteen feet thick. Negotiations are being attempted to be gone into for the purchase of Mr. Burton's claims, and his payment in shares, but without success hitherto. Mr. Trevittick considers that, as soon as he can get to work, he will raise a matter of four thousand tons

of ore, of one kind and another, the first year."

Mr. O'Calla

So said the Sentinel. ghan of the Mohawk knew that the Sentinel would have a lot of classical allusions, and determined to have a bit of Latin of his own; but his first classical gentleman had gone to cricket-match, and so he had to do it himself, which was exceedingly awkward. However,

he came of one of the bravest families of the bravest nation in the world, and, on the Galway fox-hunting rule of "either over it or through it," went at it manfully, seeing the hateful Mr. Dawson beyond, and savagely thirsting for his blood. His style, the intelligent reader will observe, if it is without the polish of that of Mr. Dickson of the Sentinel, is not wanting in a certain vigour of its

own:

"Diabolus aurat propriis,' says the blessed St. Columb, in his Hours and Meditations'-'Sus tranquillus bibit lactem,' our venerable Malachi used to observe, giving a wicked wink with the eye of him the while, in sly allusion to Brian the Mighty himself. Old Jack Dawson, the blacksmith, is in luck again, and, by means of a rather nastier job than usual, he has doubled, nay quadrupled, his hitherto enormous wealth.

It appears that Dawson's time, during his late visit to England, was passed, while not at Buckingham Palace, or elsewhere, in the smiddy of a somewhat blockish blacksmith, who has been unfortunate in business, and with whom Dawson discovered an infinite fund of fellow-feeling. This man and his family came out in the same ship with him; he was a great deal in their company at Palmerston, and finally he established them in business at Port Romilly, a place at which he had bought up every available acre of land, in anticipation of what has happened.

The

"He had bought up every piece of land but the right one, it appears. smith Burton made the discovery, and determined on his plan for swindling the colony, and in gratitude for favours

received, offered Dawson half the plunder. Dawson, with true squatter meanness, accepted it.

"The short and the long of it is, that this man has discovered in Port Romilly a mountain, calculated to be sixteen times as big as Slieve Donad, and fourteen times as ugly as the Protestant cathedral, of solid copper from top to bottom, and he and old Dawson have bought the whole thing for an old song. The affair is about as ugly a looking thing as we have seen for a long time, and, if we mistake not, Dawson will be called on, in his place in the Upper House, to give certain personal explanations; but, nevertheless, there are some considerations of a pleasant nature associated with it. In future, not only shall we supply the manufacturers of Yorkshire with the fleecy spoils of the merino of Spain or even, in time, the yet more priceless wools sheared from the back of the llama of Thibet-but the coppersmelting trade of South Wales will receive a new impetus by our enormous exports of copper, and London may yet see with envy, Swansea, a mightier metropolis than herself, arise on the shores of the Bristol Channel - a metropolis nearer to, and more influenced by, the irradiating centre of human thought at Dublin."

Mr. O'Ryan was terribly angry at this article. He swore that, if O'Callaghan ever dared to write another article without having it looked over by a competent authority, he would start another Radical paper himself. Words passed between the two gentlemen, and, if it had not been for Miss Burke, they would have fought what O'Callaghan called a "jule" about it. The Sentinel got hold of the "llama of Thibet," and made great fun of it, and the Mohawk was getting the worst of the fight, when the eagle eye of Mr. O'Ryan caught the quotation from Athenæus about the ancient Carians, and the more he looked at it the less he liked it. There might have been a building at Corinth recently disinterred, but he thought the quotation from Athenæus was the

weak place after all. He had the gravest scholastic suspicion of it. The Sisipheum at Corinth looked queer, very queer, although he knew that that gentleman was connected with the town; but this looked queerer still. The question was, was there such a thing as an Athenæus in the colony? The Roman Catholic bishop, on being appealed to, had not one, but he was good enough to step round to his Anglican brother, who, to his great delight, had one. O'Ryan carried it off to the Mohawk office in triumph. By three o'clock in the morning the first classical gentleman was in a position to report that there was no such passage whatever in the whole book. The next moment O'Callaghan hurriedly drained a tumbler of whiskey-punch, seized his pen, and rushed to his desk with a snarl like an angry tiger. By daybreak he had sent his copy downstairs, and had walked out into the fresh morning air. The most polite term applied to the quotation from Athenæus was "scoundrelly forgery; and the quarrel between the two papers continued for a long while, until, in fact, something happened which gave the colony something else to think of with a vengeance. It was the discovery of gold in New South Wales. But we shall have 'occasion to discourse of this presently.

The real truth about the discovery of the Burnt Hut copper-mine can be told very shortly. It was Trevittick's doing from beginning to end. He had been brought up a miner, or rather a miningblacksmith. His father had been captain of a mine; and mining details, and mining speculations, had been familiar to him from his youth. In addition to this he had acquired, what his father possibly had not, a tolerable working knowledge of geology; and, having got himself up in that science and in working mechanics, not to mention a little mathematics, he, by way of bringing his science to bear, came to London—and shoed omnibus horses. By the curious accident of the man's getting so far attached to us as to follow us to Australia, his knowledge was brought to bear in a most singular way. At the first glimpse of the dolomite wall, he

tells me, he began to get restless, and then (not to be tedious) he noticed the fact that all the various formations tended towards one point, Cape Wilberforce, and, when he neared that, he saw that it was nothing more than a great trap-dyke. After this, he says, if he had found a mountain of solid gold, he would not have been surprised.

Trevittick had a poor nose for gold. Those who have been in at the most glorious sport in the world-gold-hunting-may laugh at him. But he had a nose like a beagle for metals of some sort or another. He would have died sooner than break into a day's work; and hence came his Sunday rambles, and the self-accusatory frame of mind which I described in the last chapter, and which I at the time mistook for madness. Most people who have any brains, any power of original thought whatever, get more whatever, get more or less perplexed and illogical when the necessity comes upon them for breaking through old settled rules, hitherto considered as necessary to the scheme of the universe. I remember well the annoyance, vexation, and sulkiness, produced on a young Oxford gentleman who came to us at Port Romilly by the loss of an irreplaceable tooth-brush in the bush. He went so far as to refuse his breakfast. (He got over it by dinner-time, but he was a man of singular strength of character.) Now, if a highly-educated Oxford gentleman finds his balance so far disturbed by the loss of his toothbrush, and by the utter impossibility (he not being a Frenchman) of using anybody else's, how can we wonder at Trevittick, the first article of whose creed was a strict observance of what he chose to call the Sunday and Sabbath, being thrown off his balance by his being forced into a desecration of that sacred day?

He says that he was a long while before he got any indications whatever of either copper or lead. He was afraid to dig, and used only to prospect by chipping the rocks with a hammer. He had, however, many supernatural indications of the place made to him, but

was too stupid to attend to them. Once a magpie had met him, and tried to make him follow it towards the place. Another time, on going over the place, his attention was called to it by a large black snake, which was actually coiled up on it; but, in his blindness and hardness of heart, he had killed the poor innocent creature, as he called this horribly venomous reptile, and so the truth was still kept from him. At last, one day, coming through a wood hard by, he had met a grey doe kangaroo, with her little one; she had skipped along, about fifty yards before him, beckoning to him to follow; he followed, and they led him to the Burnt Hut lot, and stopped when they came to the rock. Then the little one, the "Joey," had opened its mother's pouch and got in, and the mother skipped away with it and looked round no more. such a beautiful sight, he said, that he blessed the two pretty beasts in his heart; and instantly light was vouchsafed him. What he had hitherto taken to be lichen on the rocks he now perceived to be green carbonate of copper.

It was

He announced the discovery to my father at once, who had a terrible time with him. My father got it into his head that his duty forced him to reveal the secret to Mr. Dawson. This, in Trevittick's mind, was sheer and absolute ruin. He was firmly assured that Mr. Dawson would bid over their heads, and that all their bright prospects would vanish for ever. My father knew Mr. Dawson better. He talked over Trevittick, who sulkily acquiesced. Mr. Dawson was not unprepared for the result; he himself was aware of the existence of copper on some land of his own not a mile distant, and at once not only refused to compete with my father, but offered to advance him money to make the purchase. After a generous contest between these uneducated gentlemen, it was decided that they were to share the land between them.

What between Trevittick's distrust of Mr. Dawson and his dread of the discovery leaking out, he was pretty nearly out of his mind during the interval

which elapsed before the land-sale. The moment it was over, his mind recovered its usual tone, and, although he used to tell, and firmly believe, such stories as that about the kangaroo, yet he confined this midsummer madness of his entirely to ghostly matters, and, as far as practical matters were concerned, was as shrewd and clever a manager as one could wish to have.

The Burnt Hut Copper Mining Company, consisted (ideally) of 2,000 shareholders, at 5l. per share. Of these shares, 1,000 were held by my father, 250 by Trevittick, and 250 by myself. The other 500 shares, being thrown into the market, produced 2,500l. which was every farthing of working capital we started with. Trevittick raised 6,000 tons of ore in nine months, the net value of which was 72,000l.; cost of working under 20,000l.; and this 20,000l. was in the main spent in prospective works, for, as for the copper, it was simply quarried for the first two years. "We shall do better next year, gentlemen," said Trevittick to the meeting of the shareholders, when shares had gone up from 57. to 150/. in the market, and yet most of them held on like "grim death." "When I get into the ten-fathom level, gentlemen, we shall double all this, unless I am mistaken."

He did in fact so double it, but the depreciation of the cost of copper in Europe, and another circumstance-to which I shall immediately allude by itself, as it has much to do with the web of the story-about counterbalanced the improvement in quantity. Counting from the commencement to the present time, the income we have enjoyed from the mine may be put, taking one year with another, as 17,000l. a year to my father, and about 8,000l. a year to Trevittick and myself. The first thing Trevittick did with his money was to build a brick chapel in one of the main thoroughfares of Palmerston-so large, so red, and so ugly, that, say the wags, the Governor's horses shied at it, and pitched Lady Bostock into the fishmonger's shop.