The Sun.
London, England, 1860-01-06 00:00:00

THAMES.

STEALING BRANDY ON BOARDSIIIE.—John Ivory and
John Regan, two athletic Irish labourers, were brought
before Mr. Selfe, charged with stealing two bottles of
brandy, and being helplessly drunk on board the ship
Admiral Lyons, in the East India Import Dock.
Captain Acock, the master of the Admiral Lyons, said
he was taking in cargo, and the prisoners and others had
been engaged in stowing it. Yesterday morning, at nine
o'clock, he went on board, and found the prisoners very
drunk and ri )tous. Directly afterwards ho discovered that
a case of brandy had been broken open and plundered. He
missed two quart bottles of brandy from the case. The pri•
soners were the only two men in the hold, where the cases
of brandy were stowed. Captain Acock added that these
robberies were of very frequent occurrence on board ship,
and the crews of vessels too often got blamed innocently.
Ivory, in defence, said that he drank nothing but two
pints of porter yesterday.
Mr. Selfe—Nonsense. You were so drunk yesterday that
you could not be brought here.
Regan made a similar defence--it was the porter ho
drank got the better of him upon an empty stomach.
Mr. Selfe—You were also helplessly drunk yesterday,
and could not be brought here.

The prisoners said they walked quietly to the station-
house at Poplar from the dock, but this was contradicted
by Burgess, a dock constable, who said a cart was hired to
convey the prisoners from the dock to the station-house,
and the expense was borne by the Dock Company.
The prisoners insisted they walked to the station-house.
Mr. Selfe—How could you walk unless the bottom of the
cart was oat ? There is a story of an Irishman who was
put into a sedan-chair with the bottom out. " Ah," said
the Irishman, " I might as well have walked and saved
the expense as be put into this thing." (Laughter.)
Capt. Acock said that a portion of one of the brandy bottles
was found upon Ivory, and that both prisoners vomited a
quantity of pure brandy from their stomachs in the station-
house.

Mr. Selfe—They took too much.
Captain Aocck—lndeed they did—a bottle of brandy each
before nine o'clock in the morning,
Mr. Selfe said this description of offence was very much
on the increase. No property was safe on board ships
while cargo was being stored or delivered in outward and
homeward bound ships. He sentenced the prisoners to be
imprisoned and kept to hard labour in the House of Cor-
rection for one calendar month.

LORD BROUGHAM ON DR. ANDERSON'S DlS-
coußvEs.—A gentleman residing in Ulasgow, who had for-
warded to Lord Brougham a copy of Dr. Anderson's re-
cently published volume of Discourses, has received a letter
a letter from his lordship dated Cannes, Dec. 31, 1859, in
which he says :—" The Discourses of Dr. Anderson appear
to be excellent and useful—Lord B. having been able to
read the one mentioned in Mr. L.'s note—the tenth—[' Un-
charitable Judgments Judged']—and it is worthy of all
acceptation."

WAR IN Moßocco.—An affair, in which figures
Colonel Count de Castella, brother-in-law of the Infante
Don Henry, is exciting much interest. This nobleman was
placed in command of a regiment of the army of Africa ;
but at the very beginning of the campaign ho criticised, in
violent terms, and even before his inferiors, all the opera-
tions of the general in chief. This was a very- grave fault,
but he committed a still more serious one in not being at
the head of his regiment in the combat of the 9th. For
this last negligence Marshal O'Donnell reprimanded him
very severely, and he answered haughtily. The result was
that he either demanded his dismissal or was dismissed;
and O'Donnell, in the order of dismissal, recorded—a pain-
ful thing for a soldier—that he had not been with his regi-
ment in action. On arriving at Seville the count made use
of such imprudent language that the civil governor had him
arrested and sent to Cadiz. The captain general of the
latter place had him confined in the fortress of St. Cathe-
rine, and the Supreme Naval and Military Tribunal of
Madrid has decided that he shall be tried by court-martial.
SKULLS FROM WROXETER.—In the corner of an
orchard abutting upon the Watling-street road, in the vil-
lage of Wroxeter, but within the old line of walls, upwards
of 20 human skeletons were a short time since exhumed,
several of the skulls of which presented extraordinary ap-
pearances. Their facial bones are, in fact, all askew, the
eye-sockets of one side of the face being in advance of those
of the other side. Such terrible-looking creatures as these
real original "Angles" were certainly enough to frighten
the city into subjection. An examination of these skulls,
however, and a knowledge of the conditions under which
they were found, would lead to the conviction that
Mother Earth has to answer for this distortion. When
exhumed they were in the condition of wet biscuit, in
consequence of the state of the ground, which is full of
springs. It can easily, therefore, be imagined that the
weight of the superincumbent earth, acting through so
many centuries, had pressed those skulls that had fallen
sideways thus out of their usual shape. There is in the
British Museum a skull of a Saxon warrior, disinterred not
long since in Cambridgeshire, with his Saxon ornaments
about him, which presents similar distortions with respect
to the orbits and the extraordinary elongation of the head
which these Wroxeter skulls do. Judging from this fact
alone I am inclined to think that these poor people of the
orchard have been shamefully maligned as to their per-
sonal appearance,—Once a Inek.