INTERCOLONIAL NEWS.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1191, 23 May 1872, Page 2

INTERCOLONIAL NEWS.

By the Cape mail we learn that Sir Henry Barkly has been appointed Governor of West Griqualand, which-is the official name for the. diamond fields. Dia» monds' were still being sold by auction, but prices had declined, . It is mentioned that spurious diamonds had been imported into the colony from Birmingham. '* Information has been received that Mr Sands, of Beaufort, poisoned himself on his return home from; Ballarat. He; had procured a bottle of lotion for the use of his : wife, and emptying this into a glass of beer, he drank/it,, and shortly after expired. Deceased was well r known, haying carried on the \ business -of 'a "cdrritif between Ballarat : and : ' Beaufort ; f pr w some time past. At present no tangible reason can be afforded for the rash act that ended with such tragical result. : ' Inspector Page, one of -old identities of the Victorian, police force, died at his residence in CarUon on Saturday morning, 4th 1 insti, after a short illness/ He was .between fifty andsixty years of age, and camp out with^the, ; London fifty in 1853, under Inspector Freeman, the Government of Victoria having sent home for men a short time before/ as they were unable to induce a sufficient number of colonists to enter the force in thpse^exi citing days. He came here as a sergeant) and was soon promoted tote a firsticlass inspector, which position he has creditably held since that time. " ' ' '" 'V" Berlin, which in former times was sq prolific of large nuggets, has yielded another auriferous prize.- The punolly Express reports :— « On Wednesday Messrs Murphy and Scott -were -the fortunate fiuder3 of a l^mpsof . gold weighing 421 b 8og; the same party having. 6n_the previous day turned up a; smaller, bit of 10o« lOdwt. Their claim is situated jiiear Blow's store, on Ghristmas Mat^ the depth of sinking being only 9ft. We understand that ••• the • above-nanied "Mr Scott is brother to^thelate proprietor of Scott's Hotel, Melbourne." Some time on Wednesday night, the Bth instant, a rather bold' rqbbeiy was committed oh the premises of Messrs G. and G. Shawi wholesale grocers, Flinders street east, Melbpurne. The padlock of the iron gate Opening into Flinders street was broken, and the robbers thentbbk a horse and cart into the spacious inclosure, as was evident from the traces found. Holes were bored in the celler flap, wfc'ch

•was lifted, and the thieves then got into the building by the cellar. Tobacco to the value of LllO, and some bottles of lavender water were stolen. Probably the thieves waited till the constable on the beat had passed, and then broke through the gate, entered, and recloaed it before he came round again. The same plan would also serve them in getting away. , A statement has been made in many of the English papers, particularly the Morning Post and Daily News, that the Melbourne police had a warrant out for the apprehension of Arthur Orton on a charge of murder, committed in the bush near Melbourne, and that officers of the Melbourne police were in London^ with the warrant, but it was not their intention to put it in force until the identification of Arthur Orton with the claimant had been satisfactorily proved. This is certainly not the least sensational statement made regarding the claimant to these estates, but it is evidentlyonefor the delectation of London gobemouches. We are assured,onenquiry,thatlheMelbourne police (For continuation of JS evos sea 4th Page.

knew nothing of any such warrant, and that the only document of that nature held by them is one issued by Mr John Casey, the police magistrate at Sale, against Arthur Orton for horse-stealing. This warrant was issued in 1859, and the police have reason to think that there was no horse-stealing in the case, but that the man used the horse only, a very common thing in the colony in those days, and at the present time for that part of it. Nor are they at all certain that the Tichborne Arthur Orton is the man they sought in connection with this warrant, but, from certain circumstances, are rather inclined to think that the Wapping butcher and the horse-stealer are two distinct personages. The Ballarat papers give particulars of the tragic end of Mr David Stedman, of Gordon^, a well-known storekeeper of that locality. On Friday evening he visited the house of Mr Crawford, draper, Sturt street, where he remained some little time conversing with Mr Crawford. He was then in a state of great excitement — the effects of drink taken. He declined Mr Crawford's invitation to tea, and shortly afterwards went to the closet, situated on a balcony at the rear of the house, which was surrounded by a pallisade, above which there were three cords of twisted wire, increasing its height. Mr Crawford went into the house for a minute or two, and returned to look after his guest, and saw his head above the coping of the wall, and the body suspended by the neck with a clothes-line. Life was quite extinct. The deceased, who had been a strictly temperate man for years, was one of the defendants in the action for libel, Costin y. Irwin and others, heard at the recent sittings of the County Court, and in which a verdict was returned for the plaintiff. Since then he had been drinking so heavily as to cause delirium, although on yesterday he drank nothing. It is conjectured that probably feeling a craving for drink he had endeavored to lower himself by the clothes-line to the ground, but that in climbing the fence he had caught a foot in the wires and fell with the rope twisted, but not tied, around his arm and neck. The deceased leaves a wife and five children. ■ A distressing accident happened at Sandhurst on Wednesday, the Bth inst., which resulted in the instantaneous death of a lad named Martin Kelly. The boy was in the employment of the Golden Square Tailings Company. He was working on the day shift, and between 11 and 12 o'clock in the morning the washing machinery was stopped for repair, and the engine, to which was attached a surface pump, was allowed to work very slowly. During the stoppage the boy was helping the men, and had just returned with a packet of nails which he had been sent to bring. When he delivered the nails he was seen to walk around the mill towards the pump, and that was the last that was seen of him alive. A few minutes afterwards the men were somewhat surprised on noticing that the engine, which was previously going at a creeping pace, was nearly pufled up, On looking round to see what was the matter, they were startled to see the dead body of the poor boy lying between the bed of the cylinder and the upatands of the pump. How he was killed no one could say, and the only reasonable way of .accounting for it was that he must have put his head in between the two beams to look into the well, forgetting the crank of the pump, and that while he ; was in that position the crank came up and crushed his head against the timbers, thus causing immediate death and partly pulling up the engine. The whole thing occurred in such a marvellously short space of time that it was almost incredible. It seemed as if the boy had left the men and gone deliberately to meet his fate.

"Who is Mr J. Oashel Hoey," the newly appointed secretary to the AgentGeneral, is a question which has been very frequently asked this week, says the Argti9, and which Mr Duffy's meagre reply to Mr Garratt on Wednesday haa not satisfied. Let the gentleman step forward and speak for himself. Turning over an old file of the Nation, we md. from the report of a banquet given, in September, 1853, at New Bobs, in honor of the independent Irish party, at which Mr Duffy was a distinguished guest, that Mr Cashel-Hoey, in responding to the toast of "The Irish People, 1 ' after some fervid references to a superb charge of the insurgent peaaantly in '98 which routed the King's troops, gave the following interesting autobiographical details— " I have some right to share these memories with you, my friends. I, too, boast of rebel blood, and am proud to bear the names of two ancestors, one of whom died in the Cromwellian wars, and another upon the gallows of Drogheda in '08— prouder, aye, ten million times prouder, than if the blood which they had shed had floated down to me. % duke's cornet upon its tide." These old banquet reports are rather amusing by the light of recent events.. Mr Duffy and his friends, it seems, were always met by a brass band, on the same system that has been carried out here during the recess just closed, and the many-columned speeches are distinguished by the familiar flights of fancy and the well known plentitude of poetical quotation. And all these Irish demonstrations, to complete the parallel, ended as the famous Ministerial progresses in this colony are about to end — in smoke. On the 7th of June, 1851, whilst Mr Cashel Hoey was editor of the Nation, an article appeared attacking the Queen with reference to a military spectacle. That article says :— " Her "—the Queen's— "hand has laid as heavy on Ireland as, cruelly and unrelentingly as if the won muscles of Cromwell had wielded the truncheon of sovereignty. Ireland lies in ruins at her footstool. And should she, then, lift up her voice and hands in the tones and gestures of thankfulness and joy ? Oh ! this coward and canting litany of loyalty and love for England, how it shocks conacienee — how it outrages truth— how it mocks humanity — how it offends God."