The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1841-08-17 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

SLEEPY JURORS.—In the course of an inquest held yesterday before Mr. Wakley, a juror, addressing the coroner, asked if the witness then under examination might not be allowed to sit down. Mr. Wakely replied, that he deemed it a very bad plan for witnesses to be sitting while giving their evidence, for they might perchance fall asleep, while standing kept them awake. He did not know whether the jurymen themselves, for the very same cause, should not be required to stand • for he often met with jurymen who seemed marvellously inclined to take a nap. He recollected on one occasion a very bulky gentleman, who weighed about twenty-five stone, who had been summoned as a juryman, and who, after being sworn and seated, said to the person next him, " I'm sure I shall go to sleep, so take this," giving him a pin, "and when you see me going off, just prick me with it." lie presently after dozed off, but the person who held the pin, not knowing his temper, refrained from using it, and let him slumber till he was aroused by the beadle, when he became quite enraged at not having been " pricked" by the gentleman he had appointed to that office, and he was with difficulty pacified. At an inquest at Harrow, some months since, the beadle was obliged, during the inquiry, to be continually handing snuff to the jury to enliven them ; and at a more recent inquest he held in Marylebone, after viewing the body, and before any witnesses bad been examined, the foreman went home • and on the beadle being sent for him, he actually found him in bed and fast asleep ! To prevent, therefore, the witness's falling into such a lethargic state, he had adopted the plan pursued in all other courts—namely, to make them give their testimony standing. —Herald.  From " A Few Notes on Unpaid Letters" we take the following :—" The penny postage has already wrought an extraordinary change in the public ideas of the value of money. Formerly, according to the old maxim, ninepence was but ninepence ; but even twopence has now become a sum sterling, to demand which is to stir men's blood as violently as if the said coins were flung in their faces. To put a letter into the post, and an intimate friend to the expence of twopence, was, only the other day, perfectly natural; under the present system it is fiendish. A letter sent free costs the sender a penny ; to receive a letter not prepaid, is to expend double the amount. In the degree of attention shown to this little fact, it is not impossible to find a test of the'principles of mankind—of the whole corresponding portion of creation at least. The last postoffice returns show that there are upon an average 7,654 persons—monsters in the human form, we should rather say—in this metropolis alone, who walk about day from by day, dropping stampless epistles into ravenous letterboxes,sheer misanthropy—hatred of their fellow-creatures , which feeling they are pleased to call forgetfulness, stamplessness, or copperlessness, as convenience may dictate. Reflect seriously 9 selfish, upon the character of such a correspondent. The manwhose letters are not prepaid may be thus denounced.—Re is thate, because he would rather you should pay twice than filet an injury onbe should pay once ;he would rather indisloyal, becaus hiehe ought to than act fairly himself; he is of his queen, and he'degclitnteos grace his letter with the head picked so •:. he prefers seeing his brother s two pockets one of his own to having a hand thrust into  A fine specimen of the sturgeon was caught in the salmon net at Reiss, on Saturday week. It was of a large size, rneasurina six feet seven inches long, and weighed about sixty  pounds  Moore, formerly a chartist preacher, has just died in Tewkesbury workhouse. Before his death he expressed deep repentance for having embraced the chartist cause. - -  Mr. Holloway, the ointment man, was discharged in the Insolvent Court on Tuesday last. His present debts amount to £2747, and his assets, good, bad, and indifferent, to £230. At the late Exeter Assizes, sixty barristers were in the Nisi Prius Court in a short time after its opening, being more than double the number of causes on the list.  One of the 36 carrier-pigeons despatched from Bayonne the other day reached Liege, a distance of 300 leagues, in 24 bout s.  Three suicides by respectable persons, brought about by gambling, and other pecuniary embarrassments, took place in Lisbon last week.  - INCREASE OF EminnATioN.—Arrived at Quebec, to the 24th July, 22,577 emigrants. To same period last year, 18,280. Increase 4,297.  - , Mr. Green, the aeronaut, made a nocturnal aerial voyage in the Nassau balloon on Monday from Vauxhall Gardens, London, and alighted at Barking, in Essex.