Last week, an eagle was shot in a field near Cummerfield, by Mr Anderson, of Ullswater. The wings of this bird measure, when extended from point to point, six feet ten inches. It is likely to live, having been only slightly wounded in one of the pinions.

CURIOUS CAUSE.-The King and the Lord of the Manor of Holder nesse. The curious suit between the Crown and -Constable, Esq.,lord of the manor of Holdernesse, in Yorkshire, is at length determined: it is of much importance to lords of manors on the sea coast.

A cask of wine was floated on shore on the coast of the manor of Holdernesse. The coast bailiff, and some Custom-house officers, on hear ing of the stranger's arrival, went immediately to pay a complimentary visit; the officers laid hold of one end of the cask, and said, "this be longs to the king:" the bailiff laid hold of the other end, and said it belonged to the lord of the manor. Says the officers, "It is smuggled; it has not paid the port duty;" said the bailiff, “I think it is Madeira." The officers smiled at the honest man's blunder, and explained, they meant the duty on wine imported. Says the bailiff, "It has been in no port, it has come by itself on the beach." Both parties remained inflexible; and the officers having, after grave consultation, determined, that the bailiff could not drink the wine whilst they went to their Custom-house, at a short distance, for advice, proposed the wine should be put into a small hut; but the bailiff, thinking it safer within the lord's immediate jurisdiction, in the mean time removed it to the cellar of the baro nial chateau. The officers returned on this "Oh, ho!" said they,

:

"now we have you; the wine is ours to all intents and purposes, as it has been removed without a permit." Says the bailiff," If I had not removed the wine without a permit, the sea would the next tide." "Then," quoth the officers, "the sea would have been put into the Court of Exchequer." The bailiff shut the great hall door in their faces.

The lord was exchequered; that is, the attorney-general filed his informa tion against him; lawyers learned were engaged on both sides; the crown lawyers said the officers were certainly right; the lord's lawyers said he certainly was.

The cause came on at York assizes. and the noise it made was as great as the contested election there. All the wine-bibbing lords of manors in that and the adjoining counties were present, and the court was consequently very much crowded. A special verdict was found, which left the question for the determination of the Court of Exchequer.

It came on to be argued. Sir Roger de Coverley's dietum, that "a great deal may be said on both sides,” was demonstrated to the fullest extent by the long-robed band of wordy combatants engaged by the crown and the lord of the manor.

The court took time to deliberate; and on the last day of last term pronounced judgment, that it was a case which the act requiring permits for the removal of wine did not embrace, the act only alluding to wine which had paid duty; that from the case in Vaughan, it was clear, that wine to be liable to duty must be imported; that wine, as Vaughan said, could not be imported by itself, but must be by the agency of some one else; and that it was in that case determined, that wine wrecked could not be sub

ject to duty. The lord keeps the wine, and will have to pay an enormous bill of costs for the defence of his rights, as in informations by the attorney-general, though the verdict is with the defendant, he does not get his costs. And the counsel who were in the cause say, in their opinion, it was one of the best casks of wine which ever reached the English coast. At half-past two o'clock, on Tuesday, the corning-house, No. 4. in the king's powder-mills, at Faversham, blew up with a most tremendous explosion. Of the six men employed in the building at the time, four were blown to pieces, and their bodies and limbs were scattered to a distance of upwards of 100 yards from the scite of the building. One of their arms was found on the top of a high elm tree. The fifth man was taken up alive, but no hopes of his recovery are entertained. The sixth man, George Holmes, the foreman of the work, was found alive also, sitting in the midst of the smoking ruins, with his clothes burning, but he was other. wise not much injured, and is likely to do well. At the door of the corning-house was standing a tumbril, or covered waggon, with two horses and a driver. The waggon was blown to pieces, and the driver and horses were killed. Of three horses employed within the building, two have perished, but the third is living The scattered remains of two of the men were collected on Tuesday evening for interment; those of the other three had not been found. No circumstances have transpired, from which an opinion can be formed with respect to the cause of the accident : it is the third of the kind that has happened at these mills within these seven years,

19th.-SWINDLING.MANSIONHOUSE.-John Cooper, a young man of gentlemanly appearance, and not above 23 years of age, was brought before the magistrate under a variety of charges, for obtaining goods on false pretences; and, certainly, the instances proved against him evinced a boldness of adventure, and a knowledge of ways and means rarely excelled by any modern genius, for "carrying on a war," as the phrase is, since the exploits of the celebrated Major Semple.

The first charge was brought forward by a Mr Blundell, a mercer, of Bishopsgate-street, from whose statement it appeared, that on the 20th of last December, the prisoner came to his shop, bargained for a quantity of sarsenet, amounting to 61. 3s. 6d., and ordered it to be sent with a bill to the Bull inn, in the same street, where he would pay for it. It was according ly sent by Mr Blundell's porter, who took with him change amounting to the difference between the bill and 71. The prisoner took the goods and change, and gave the porter two banker's notes, one for 51. and the other for 21., which the porter brought to his master, but which, on examination, proved to be country notes, purporting to be issued by some bank in Hampshire, made payable by Jogget and Co., City Chambers, and marked with the signatures of Cooper and Hardwicke. Upon inquiry, however, at the City Chambers, Mr Blundell was informed these notes were ficti tious, and that there was no such bank as that from which they purported to issue.

The next accuser was a Mr Bumstead, a hosier in the city, who stated that the prisoner came to his house, and gave an order for hosiery to the

amount of 61., which he desired to be sent to Broad-street Chambers, with a bill, to be there paid. They were sent in consequence to the prisoner's chambers there, and paid for. In a few days subsequently, the prisoner again called and gave an order for shirts, handkerchiefs, hosiery, and other goods, to the amount of 351. 18s., and ordered also that they should be sent as before to Broad-street Chambers. On their being sent there, he said his clerk had just gone out, and inadvertently taken with him the key of the desk, so that he could not get at his banker's check book; but requested the messenger to leave the goods, and call at any other time. This was done; but the prisoner was never more to be found there, nor any clue to find him elsewhere.

Various other persons brought different charges against him for goods, out of which he had swindled them, with the assistance of a young man named Hardwicke, who acted as his clerk at Broad-street Chambers. Amongst the number was Mr Samuel Nock, gun-smith, of Fleet-street, from whom Hardwicke had obtained a gun and a pair of pistols, amounting to 401., upon a fictitious bill of exchange: also Mr Mortimer, another gun-smith, of Ludgate-hill, from whom he got a double-barrelled fowling-piece, and some other articles, by a similar stratagem.

Mr Chadwick, a silver-smith, of Cornhill, charged the prisoner with having obtained from him, in a like fraudulent way, a number of silver forks and spoons.

Mr Deynes, of Walworth, complained also of being swindled by the prisoner out of a cut-glass chandelier, and decanters, of considerable value; and a Mr Lathy, of Newgate street, stated that the prisoner had, in like

manner, obtained from him linen to the amount of 251.

Several other persons were in attendance, to prove other frauds against the prisoner; but there was not time for their examination.

It appeared, that the prisoner, in company with Hardwicke, had occupied those rooms in Broad-street Chambers for the very purpose of receiving goods. They employed a clerk of reputable appearance to receive the goods, and give plausible answers to all inquiries. They had another house at Walworth, and a counting-house in Westminster, each of which answered the double purpose of a receptacle for spoil; and a place of reference from the other two. Many persons were by these means grossly cheated; for when the goods were once secured in the trap, the purchaser was never again to be seen. Hardwicke sometimes assumed the name of Cooper, and Cooper occasionally took that of Jackson. A man whom they employed as gardener at their house at Walworth, and to whom they never paid any wages, stated, that they decamped with the whole furniture of the house in one night; that the cart which carried it was unloaded in the middle of a field, and after a little time the goods were placed in another cart, and removed to some place known only to the prisoner and his accomplice.

The extent to which these men contrived to carry on this system, is scarcely calculable. It is supposed that above an hundred persons were the dupes of their artifices under various pretences.

Cooper, we understand, is the son of a gentleman, of respectable character and property, residing at Hammersmith; and who has, more than once before, extricated this young man

from perilous situations, the results of his criminal pursuits.

He was committed for further examination on a future day.

On Thursday last, five prisoners (convicts under sentence of transportation,) attempted to escape from Mullingar gaol, in a manner, perhaps, unprecedented for madness and desperation. They set fire to every thing combustible in their cells, from which they would certainly have escaped, (the doors being very improperly of wood,) had not the smoke almost suffocated some of the other prisoners; the groans from one of whom awakened the gaoler, by whose exertions, assisted by the city of Cork militia, the prisoners were secured, and a ladder of ropes, provided by their friends outside, was taken possession of.

A gentleman on Thursday, in Ox. ford-street, near the corner of Bondstreet, accidentally slipping from the pavement, by the mere suddenness of the shock, fractured the patella of his left knee, which was effectually separated in the centre, and one part went down his shin, the other above his knee. Such is the structure of this bone, that it would require the stroke of a cleaver to cut it asunder, and yet in this case, the separature was occasioned by the sudden divulsive force of the muscles of the leg and thigh.

22d.-BELFAST.--We are concerned to state, that a very singular circumstance occurred on Tuesday morning last in this city. A report similar to the firing of cannon, or some great explosion, was heard in the concerns of Mrs Maguire, an eminent cotton manufacturer, in Ardeestreet, in the Liberty, the family being in bed; they immediately arose, and to their great astonishment, found that the roof of the wareroom, ad

joining to which was deposited Irish goods to the amount of upwards of 50001., had been completely blown off, the walls of the building materially injured, and a great part of it on fire, as also a large pack of cottonwool that was in the wareroom. On further examination, it was discovered that a kind of infernal machine had been placed in the wareroom by some evil-minded villains, which was com posed of pitch, tar, old iron, and gunpowder, all closely tied up in a piece of sail-cloth; and as the warehouse is immediately adjoining the dwellinghouse, the object must have been not only the destruction of the buildings, but the lives of the inhabitants of the whole neighbourhood. From the damage done, the quantity of powder used must have been very considerable.

After six weeks of incessant rain, the inhabitants of Plymouth were surprised with the most severe frost ever known in that southern climate. The thermometer on Tuesday morning, in a south situation in the open air, stood at 18 degrees, viz. 14 degrees below the freezing point. Part of the river Tamar, from New Passage, was so frozen over, that boats broke through it, and the oars cracked the ice with their strokes.

SETTLEMENT.-At the late Norfolk sessions, an important case of settlement came on to be heard, in which the parish of Kentford, Suffolk, were appellants, and the parish of North Lopham, Norfolk, respondents. The appeal was against an order of removal of a female pauper, named Lucy Worledge, from North Lopham to Kentford, at which latter place, it was contended, on the part of the respondents, that a settlement had been acquired, by hiring and service for a year. To prove this,

the pauper herself, a girl of sixteen years of age, was called, who stated, that a little before Michaelmas, three or four years ago, being with her mother at Kenning-hall petty sessions, a person of the name of William Bowell came up and gave her mother a sixpence, but did not tell her what it was for, and went away. Shortly after, a Mr Cooke, of North Lopham, approached, and asked her mo ther if she knew what the sixpence was given for; and her mother answered in the negative. Cooke then told her that the sixpence was letting money, and she (the pauper) was to go to Kentford, into the service of a Mr Luke Bowell, the brother of William Bowell, and he encouraged her to go. When the pauper and her mother returned home to North Lop ham, the latter acquainted a Mr Worledge (grandfather of the pauper) with what had happened, who said, she (the pauper) should not go, assigning as a reason, that there might be the same bad folks at Kentford as there were at Lopham, in which expression he alluded to the circumstance of the pauper's mother having had a child by William Bowell. In consequence of this determination of the grandfather, the sixpence was sent back to William Bowell; and the girl, to avoid going into the service in question, was secreted by the mother in the poor's house for nearly a month, when William Bowell's son came, and, forcibly taking her away, without hat or shoes, and literally in rags, threw her into a cart; and in this state she was conveyed to the house of Luke Bowell, at Kentford, where she was taken in by a Mrs Woodstock (Luke Bowell's sister, and at that time his partner in the farming business,) who remon strated against the bringing of such

a" young stark-naked wretch into her house, instead of a servant that could do her some good."-The pauper stated her arrival at Kentford to have been a month after Michaelmas day; and that about a fortnight before the Michaelmas following, W. Bowell and his wife came, and took her in a cart to March, in the Isle of Ely, where she was hired into the service of a Mr Grey for a year, but staid only half a-year. This wicked conspiracy was formed for the purpose of relieving William Bowell from the maintenance of his bastard child, and of settling the pauper on Kentford parish. The court, in delivering judgment, after commenting on the conduct of the Bowells and Mr Cooke, and on the cruel manner in which this poor unfortunate girl, then little more than 12 years of age, was dragged from her mother, almost in a state of nakedness, and sent to a distance of upwards of 30 miles, and afterwards transferred to a more remote part of the country, quashed the order of removal with full costs.

The Catholic laity of England having resolved, in opposition to their clergy, to make an offer of the Veto to his majesty, are stated to have con certed measures for that purpose with certain members of parliament, who have hitherto advocated the justice and necessity of an unconditional emancipation of the Roman Catholics. It is also said, that a bill is to be introduced into parliament next session, making it imperative on the Roman Catholic bishop, under a severe pe. nalty, whenever a vacancy occurs to return to the office of the secretary of state a list of candidates, from which any objectionable person is to be struck out, and the vacancy to be filled by one of the approved candidates. A general meeting of Roman