CANVAS TOWNS.
Our contemporary, Household Words, has given an account of Canvas Town in the new world, but we doubt whether a description of one of the Canvas Towns—or Towns under Canvas—in the old world, would not reveal a greater amount of depravity and corruption than anything that exists even in Australia. A Canvas Town in England is no less bent on gold discovery than a Canvas Town at Port Phillip—the only difference being that the candidate's pocket, instead of the earth, is the place that the electors or gold diggers are continually digging into. In the Colonies the inhabitants of a Canvas Town are huddled together irrespective of rank, and frequently the best educated persons are found doing the dirtiest work, just as may be seen in a Canvas Town in England before election time. The inhabitants of a Colonial Canvas Town think only of the gold and the quartz, just as at home the inhabitants of a Canvas Town think of nothing but filthy dross and drink—the quarts taking of course precedence of the pints in the estimation of the "independent" voters.