The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-05-06 00:00:00

moting Christian knowledge

C. B. Adderley, Esq., M.P., has contributed £5OO, and
H. H. Williamson, Esq., £3OO, towards the erection of a
church, parsonage house, and school, at Brown Edge, Nor-
:on-in-the-Moors, Staffordshire.

It appears from the report of the council of King's Col-
lege that the total receipts of the past year amounted to
£21,569, and that the number of students who matriculated
was 813.

A letter from Florence says that the mine of quicksilver,
discovered last year in the environs of Peravezza, near Pisa,
is in full work, and yielded last month more than 6,0001b5. ;

produce that is daily increasing

The Courrier Francais states that, according to the rate at
which the emancipation of the slaves' in the French West
India Islands is proceeding, it will require a century to set
them free. _ .

We understand that arrangements are being made by the
principal booksellers and stationers in Edinburgh to shut
their places of business on Saturdays at five o'clock, for the
purpose of allowing themselves and those in their employ-
ment to have a larger portion of time than heretofore for
rational amusement and recreation.—Glasgow paper, 23d
April, 1842.
Frogmore Lodge, the residence of the late Princess Au-
gusta, has recently been extensively improved, and is to be
appropriated for the future to the use of the Duchess of
Kent. It is understood that it is intended as the nursery of
the infant family of her Majesty and Prince Albert, where
they will generally reside, under the same roof as the Duchess
of Kent.

The eminent preacher, South, who dearly loved a pun,
once exclaimed from the pulpit, " marriage was formerly a
merry age, but matrimony is now become a matter of
money." If this was true in Charles the Second's days,
how much truer is it now, when habits of business have
superseded everything in the shape of natural emotion ! In
affairs of the heart we now split upon settlements, where for-
merly we split upon sentiment.
An old lady, aged sixty, was walking down Camberwell-
road, London, on Tuesday, and in her anxiety to avoid a boy
with an iron hoop slipped off the kirbstone, and fell with such
violence to the ground that there is scarcely any hope of her
recovery.—[The trundling of iron boops in many of the
crowded thoroughfares of Liverpool is a great nuisance, and
ought to be suppressed.]
At Windsor, on Tuesday, a foreigner ascended 400 feet on
the inclined plane of a tightened single cord, the extreme
point rising from 30 to upwards of 60 feet in height. When
reaching the top he addressed the multitude assembled to
witness him, and as there was no ladder sufficiently long to
enable him to descend by that means from his immense
height, he was compelled to let himself down by clinging to
one of the poles to which the rope was affixed, and safely
alighted on the ground.
WESLEYAN MISSIONARY SOCIETY.—The annual meeting
of the Wesleyan Missionary Society was held on Monday, in
the great room, Exeter-hall. Colonel Conolly, M.P., pre-
sided. The Rev. Jabez Bunting read the report for the past
year, from which it appeared that the receipts amounted to
£101,688 2s. 4d.—(loud cheers)—and the expenditure to
£98,754 7s. 9d., leaving a surplus of £2933 14s. 7d. The
nett increase of the year, as compared with the preceding, is
£11,505 13s. Bd. The present number of principal or central
mission stations, called circuits occupied by the society ill
the several parts of the world, is 261 ; the number of mis-
sionaries employed, exclusive of catechists, 368 ; the number
of full and accredited church members, exclusive of those
under the care of the society's missionaries in Ireland, 87,2558;
and the number of scholars in the mission schools is nearly
60,000. The report was adopted.
ADVICE TO TRADESMEN'S ASSISTANTS.—Let no place or
circumstance prevent your acquiring knowledge. Whenever
and wherever a leisure moment offers, improve it; and, that
you may be prepared to do this, always carry a book in your
pocket. If the writer may speak his own experince on this
point, he would say, that by following this course for years,
he has acquired a considerable portion of his information. In
waiting for another, if it be but for a minute or two, open
your book, you may fasten on a sentence that will sup-
ply you with matter for hours afterwards. You will be
told that, in so doing, business will most likely be neglected,
and that business must be attended to ; but may it not be
said in answer, that the mind must not be neglected, and
and that business cannot be neglected when there is no busi-
ness to be transacted. The interest of a master is not more
likely to be promoted when his servant is sitting or standing
idle than when he is enlightening his mind by means of a
book ; for if he be not, in his spare moments, gathering up
the thoughts of others, it is very probable that his own, like
the fool's eye, will be wandering to the ends of the earth.
Thousands in this great city waste a considerable fraction of
their time in waiting for business. Now, if they cannot put
forth fresh efforts to obtain it, it were better for them, till it
comes, to occupy themselves in the important duty of mental
culture. Time, invaluable time, should never be passed in
idleness ; for time, with us, will soon be no more. Acquire
knowledge, then, whenever you can. In all places. under all
circumstances, acquire knowledge. Let your determination
to acquire it be but fixed, and you will succeed.—Prom a
pamphlet entitled " Mental Culture."

THE OFFICERS OF EXClSE.—Several communications
have appeared in our columns relative to the salaries of the
working officers of the Excise, particularly the supervisors,
and showing that the expenses of a horse, and the cost of
five or six journies a week, which are necessary for the proper
fulfilment of their duty (nothing being allowed for travelling
expenses), swallowed up the greater part of their income,
leaving but a small sum to support them and their families
which their position as Government officers, and their gene-
ral integrity, entitle them to hold. A correspondent has
since called our attention to an article in Chambers' Jour-
nal, which points out many of the hardships which have been
complained of. The writer observes that the duties of a su-
pervisor are exceedingly heavy, he being employed in super-
vising, examining, and sifting the operations of the whole
district, which often occupies him 15 hours a day. The sa-
lary is two hundred pounds a year, out of which in a country
district, he is obliged to keep his own horse and pay every
expense. This salary, the writer observes, "is inadequate
to the severity of the labour and responsibility of the office."
The duties of the inferior officer are equally severe, and his
accounts are required to be kept with the utmost exactness.
Added to this there is the discomfort and inconvenience of
removal every few years, not less teasing to the individual
than useless in point of public advantage, which prevents
these officers renting or furnishing a house on the most eco-
nomical terms, properly arranging for the education and
settlement of their children, or permanently attaching them-
selves to any religious communion, In fact, the claims of
these officers, upon whose diligence, efficiency, and integrity
depends the fair collection of a revenue of such vast impor-
tance to the state, is entitled to the consideration of " the
powers that be ;" and, if the matter were fully looked into
by them, the justice would be seen of giving to those who
are emphatically " the working men" in this branch of re-
venue, at least an allowance for travelling expenses propor-
tionate to that enjoyed by the officers of a higher grade.—
Chelmsford Chronicle.
SINGULAR SCENE AT LOUGHBOROUGH.—On Wednesday,
the 20th ult., a woman named Mary Rollett, the wife of a
pensioner named William Rollett, formerly of Sutton Bon-
nington, latterly of Nottingham, died at Loughborough
workhouse, worn out with debility and age. She had been
almost helpless for a considerable time, and her death had
been hourly expected for several weeks before it took place.
Her husband was informed of the circumstance, and came
over to the funeral, which took place on Friday, the coffin
being borne by six inmates of the workhouse. After the
grave had been filled up, some children playing near the spot
fancied they heard the woman groan, and ran home to tell
their mothers of it. In a short time a number of women
gathered round the grave, and putting their ears to the earth,
were convinced they heard the groans also, and even affirmed
that they felt the earth shake from the efforts of the woman
to escape from her horrible confinement. It was known that
the funeral was a parish one, and the idea immediately came
into their heads that the officers at the workhouse had caused
her to be buried alive to get rid of her. Burning with the
thought, they resolved to open the grave, having first ex-
hausted all their rhetoric upon the sexton (who stood by a
silent spectator), but all to no purpose, for he positively re-
fused to act without orders from his superiors, and several
of them setting to work with their fingers they cleared the
rods from the grave in an instant, and commenced raking
the earth up with their fingers. The churchyard was soon
all in bustle with persons flocking to learn what was going
forward, and at last there could not be many short of 2000
present, some manifesting great anxiety ; others laughing at
what they believed to be little short of madness. Mean-
while the women raked away, changing when tired with other
t
bystanding females. At length they got a trencher, a broken
plate, and a piece of a saw for tools, and the digging went on
apace. At first they thirst not use any implements besides
their fingers, as a wag had told them that they would not be
prosecuted if they used only natural tools, but their earnest-
ness increasing with their toil, they resolved to bid defiance
to what they supposed was law, and dig with what they could
get in any way useful. To crown all, a spade was handed
in, and one end of the coffin was laid bare in a twinkling,
and the other would soon have been, but here the sexton was
ordered by the clerk to finish the job. He did so, the coffin
was opened, and the corpse was found exactly as it had been
placed, the funeral habiliments not disordered, and the body
dead enough. While the digging was going on the sexton
had to stand no little insult from the infuriated women, one
of whom, named Barne a sweep's wife, told him he had
y,
often buried people alive for money, and would do it again.
She also put her fist in his face, and loaded him with almost
every epithet in the genteel vocabulary. Another woman got
on a tombstone, and harangued the crowd cn the abomina-
tions of commissioners and bastiles, and also of workhouse
masters who would not hesitate to bury people alive.—
Leicestershire Mercury.