MISCELLANY. rewsßßoKEßs.—Their Origin and Progress.— illemebody, with more money than brains, staked a philosopher, in derision, how it hap pened that men of wit were so frequently seen at the doors of the rich, and that the rich were never seen at the doors of men of wit. " Be t/arse," retorted the sage, "men of wit know the value of riches ; but rich men do not know ihe value of wit." Necessity, mother of in vention, teaches the needy devices and resour ces in their ninny hours of trial, which the affluent scarcely know the names of. IN who has never known want is unlikely to provide himself, beforehand, with weapons to combat IL The supply will come to him from some wikeste ; if the earth and the sea fail, the skies aka rain manna. The poor man with his hungry family has no such expectations.— nese are hundreds of thousands in the great cities of the world, who subsist upon what they eau earn, hand to mouth, from day to day or week to week. Their toil is like that of Sisy *as, and apparently as hopeless. Sad enough it is to see so many such cases, and our only etimacaation lies in the fact that those bred and inured to constant physical labor, carry the hurthen less consciously and painfully than ethers. We speak not now of the class a re roan above ; that which owns the ten millions in the Philadelphia Savings Bank, and who, at Sae end of the perspective, see an old age of Mort in competency. Whoever can save eves a dollar a week from his shop, or his bench, or what not, need not despair of the hatter good fortune, as events have proved.— Not so with him who, earning a dollar, is cora pal.Wl by inexorable necessity to spend a hun dred cents, for his own sake or others, for food and fuel and rent and covering. Then, if the time comes that his handiwork is in poor pay, er worse, not wanted at all, or if the over-taxed 'body gives out for a season, and can dig or rind no more till convalescent, where is the remedy, and whence comes the bread ? Here they seek the resource which the rich know little of. The poor wife in her scanty shawl and. faded bonnet, or the meagre child in worn cut shoes and pieced out garments, takes the spoons, the best dress, Sunday coat, the few bits of poor old jewelry, and hurries round the earner to the sign of the three balls—the pawn larekeea. Sometimes people much higher in the social scale have recourse to the same facility for temporary relief; yet so seldom, comparatively speaking, that we can regard their cases as aseeptional, and the pawnbroker's institution Imre especially the convenience or necessity of the poorer classes. Now, the misfortune is, that. the more people require a certain conveni ence in life, the higher the price they have to pay for it; a :rule which applies with great severity to unfortunates requiring small sums of ready money. In the absence of legislative keterference, therefore, and sometimes in spite of it, the interest charged for sums advanced en pledges has been cruelly exhorbitant. The class of persons in whose hands the peculiar business appears to have legitimately fallen are, unfortunately, not distinguished for a breadth, of generosity in pecuniary dealings, any more than for exalted estimates of relative values. It has followed that those of all others mho can least afford to pay a high price for temporary accommodation, have been made the victims of an usury quite unexampled in other contingencies. A further grave objection to pawnbroker's shops has been found in the temptation they afford to thieves from their facility of disposing of booty, the risk being indemnified, in a manner, by the extent of profit. In view of these considerations, we must regard as a public benefit the success of the new Pawners'Bank of Boston, which has now been a year in successful operation. This in stitution is designed to furnish small loans on collateral security at a moderate rate of inter est, and, from the condition of its existence, militates directly against the objections we have Mated. The directors are permitted to charge "one and a half per cent_ a month on advances equal to two-thirds of an auction valuation of articles pawned for any time up to six months." They are only permitted to declare eight per cent. dividends, and any profits remaining Orly, after such declaration, are to be dis tribution in (Inform of fuel to needy persons daring the winter months. Thus the extra interest which may be collected finds its way, is some degree, back to the class from which it is drawn—certainly a most excellent method. Bits How TREY GROW.—The other day we were reading, says a Boston paper, of a jolly old Frenchman, in one of the towns of Illinois, who boasts of having built the first house on he present site of Chicago, a city that now has a population of something like 185,000. This reminds us of an incident that happened to us some score of years ago, in Cincinnati. We were smoking our post-prandial cigar in the reading room of Cromwell's Hotel, in company with a couple of friends, when an amphibious looking person, half farmer, half flatboatman, joined in our conversation on some slight pre text. "