were put on Mr. Martin’s track. Taught by experience in the forgery case, the police were now more alert, and when confronted by the men in blue, the hero of the story was unable to give satisfactory answers to their questions, and immediately set about to show that discretion was the better part of valour by delivering his too easily acquired stock to their several owners. The goods thus returned included ten or twelve pairs of boots from Mr. John Reeves; showing that he, astute and wary as he was in the case of uttering forged notes, was not entirely proof against imposition.
A Loin purloined. On the 16th of December, during the evening, the larder at 34 Marina was found to be minus a loin of mutton, a leg of mutton and a piece of beef. This was achieved by some unseen person who cared more for meat than honesty.
Stealing and assaulting. On a Sunday evening, two respectable females who were out on an errand occasioned by illness of one of their household, were knocked down by four navvies, issuing from the Albion Shades, and were considerably hurt, one of them also having stolen from her a shawl, said to be worth a guinea. People might well desire the railways finished and the workmen gone.
Bank Robbery. The not infrequent robberies of banks in one way or another proves that notwithstanding their many checks to dishonesty, the ingenuity and dexterity of thieves are sometimes more than a match for them. In the second month of the year now under review (Feb. 17th) a young man, 20 years of age, named Thomas F. Laurence, by profession a sailor, entered the Hastings branch of the London and County Bank, then in George street and carried off £37 in gold and £22 7s. in silver.
The Church a Robber. It is possible that there would be many dissentients to the following charge made at an All Saints’ vestry on April 1st, but the charge was there and then made by Mr. “Split-plum” (Henry) Thwaites, who was a Wesleyan as well as a grocer. Mr. Jackson having proposed that Thomas Elliott be re-elected organist at £20 a year, and the money be raised by subscription, Mr. Thwaites opposed it, with considerable warmth. He declared that parties ought to pay for their own peculiar pleasures out of their own pockets. He disapproved of instrumental music in a place of worship altogether, and he considered it very dishonourable for churchmen to force others to pay for what only themselves approved of. But the Church had got the law on its side; and it was like a rogue, when it got you down, you were obliged to submit and let him put his hands into your pocket and take your money out. It was a shame for the Church to dip its hands into people’s pockets in that way in order to get their money. The proposition being that the pay of the organist should be raised by subscription the probability was that Mr. Thwaites would not be asked to subscribe, and that those who wanted the music would be -
