er to
confound a large labour-market with good sources of employment.' It
does not appear to us to be one of the least of the benefits that will
accrue after convalescence from the gold-fever in Australia, the
higher value the employed will set upon their labour. We cannot reason
from the English standard, which has not been deliberately fixed, but
forced upon us by competition, excessive population, public burdens,
and the necessities of social position. In a new country, however,
where all these circumstances are absent, and whither employers and
employed resort alike for the purpose of bettering their condition, we
should like to see traditions cast aside, and the fabric of society
erected on a new basis.

BURGOMASTER LAW IN PRUSSIA.

On turning out, and then turning over, a mass of old papers which had
lain packed up in a heavy mail-trunk for a period of more than forty
years, I came the other day upon a little bundle of documents in legal
German manuscript, the sight of which set me, old as I am, a laughing
involuntarily, and brought back in full force to my memory the
circumstances which I am about briefly to relate. A strange thing is
this memory, by the way, and strangely moved by trifles to the
exercise of its marvellous power. For more than thirty years--for the
average period that suffices to change the generation of man upon
earth--had this preposterous adventure, and everything connected with
it, lain dormant in some sealed-up cavity of my brain, when the bare
sight of the little bundle of small-sized German foolscap, with its
ragged edges and blotted official pages, has set the whole paltry
drama, with all its dignified performers, in motion before the retina
of my mind's eye with all the reality of the actual occurrence.

It was in the spring or early summer of the year 1806, that, in the
capacity of companion and interpreter to a young nobleman who was
making the tour of Germany, I was travelling on the high-road from
Magdeburg to Berlin. We rolled along in a stout English carriage drawn
by German post-horses, and having left Magdeburg after an early
breakfast, stopped at a small neat town, some eighteen or twenty miles
on our route--my patron intending to remain there for an hour or two,
in the hope of being rejoined by a friend who had promised to overtake
us. He ordered refreshment, and sat down and partook of it, while I,
not choosing to participate, seated myself in the recess of
an old-