No later than yesterday the Cloonakilty Express was stopped by a band of young men, who savagely ill-treated our courier, a youth of tender age, having attempted to stone him to death.  Our courier is ready to swear that at the time of the attack the young men were busily engaged counting a vast store of ammunition, consisting of round white clay balls baked to the hardness of bullets, and evidently intended for shooting with.

I have to call particular attention to the fact that a countryman was this day observed to buy a threepenny loaf, and on leaving the baker’s to tear it asunder and distribute the fragments with three confederates!!! an act which I need not say was evidently symbolical of their desire to rend asunder the Corn Laws, and to divide the landed property amongst themselves.  The action also appears analogous to the custom of breaking bread and swearing alliance on it, a practice still observed by the inhabitants of some remote regions of the Caucasus.  I must again solemnly express my conviction that we are standing on a slumbering VOLCANO; the thoughtless and unobservant may suppose not; probably because in the present tee-total state of society they see nothing of the CRATER.

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TAKING A SIGHT AT THE FIRE.

A man bearing the very inapplicable name of Virtue was brought up at Lambeth-street last week, on the charge of having stolen a telescope from the Ordnance-office in the Tower on the morning of the fire.  The prisoner pleaded that, being short-sighted, he took the glass to have a sight of the fire.  The magistrate, however, saw through this excuse very clearly; and as it was apparent that Virtue had taken a glass too much on the occasion, he was fully committed.

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JOE HUME’S FORTHCOMING WORK.

We have received the following note from an old and esteemed correspondent, who, we are rejoiced to find, has returned from a tour in Switzerland, where he has been engaged in a prodigious work connected with the statistics of that country.

Reform Club-house.

DEAR PUNCH,

Knowing the interest you take in anything relating to the advancement of science, I beg to apprise you that I am about publishing a statistical work, in which I have made it perfectly clear that an immense saving in the article of ice alone might be made in England by importing that which lies waste upon Mont Blanc.  I have also calculated to a fraction the number of pints of milk produced in the canton of Berne, distinguishing the quantity used in the making of cheese from that which has been consumed in the manufacture of butter—­and specifying in every instance whether the milk has been yielded by cows or goats.