Vranintto.

A school for the children of Commercial Travellers hasjust been fin- ished at Pinner, close to the station there belonging to the North-Western Railway Company : it is intended to accommodate 300 children, and to replace the old schools at Wanstead. The new building was opened on Saturday by Prince Albert, in the presence of the Lord Mayor, the She- riffs, and a great company. An address was presented to Prince Albert, giving some account of this well-known institution : to which the Prince replied— "Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, Accept my best thanks for your address, and for the very gratifying expressions of your loyal and affectionate attach- ment to the Queen and her family. I have had much satisfaction in mark- ing by my presence on this occasion the interest felt by the Queen as well as by myself in everything. affecting the welfare and happiness of any class of her subjects ; and most sincerely do I congratulate you on the success which has so far rewarded your spirited and praiseworthy efforts to secure an asylum for the orphan children of members of your body. Nor can I doubt that the most sanguine expectations of those who anticipate from the increased means of accommodation which has now been provided a corresponding increase of benefit will be realized."

Then Prince Albert declared the school opened ; Dr. Vaughan, the Principal of Harrow, offered up a prayer ; young ladies placed purses for the charity on a table before the Prince ; and the rites and ceremonies closed with a lunoheon, and an inspection of the building. Subsequently, the Lord Mayor presided over a dinner given to the visitors in the hall of the institution.

The Ripon Mechanics' Institution reached the end of its twenty-third year yesterday week, and its friends and supporters kept the anniversary with all the honours. Besides the local notables, there were present the Dean of Riponn the chair, and three Members of Parliament—Lord

H Goderich, the Honourable Edwin Lascelles, and Mr. William Beckett. A concert preceded the drier business of receiving the annual report; and then followed speeches from the distinguished guests. The Chairman commented on the spread of education, " since he was swaddled, seventy years ago" ; the progress of missionary efforts, of Bible education, of libraries, of mechanics' institutes, of science ; and the advent of that "extraordinary fact that succession to office is to be decided by talent."

" It is the upheaving of the public, without respect to influence. No one reed now to go to a Member of Parliament to solicit a place. Let them sharpen their talents, and attend the institutes, and they would be sure of their office. It was a great movement, something the world had never seen before : every individual has now a right to participate in the glories of his country, and every member of mechanics' institutes must feel his feet ting- ling on the threshold of Downing Street." (Laughter.)

Lord Goderich urged them not to stand still, satisfied with what has been done but to make further progress. A friend of his, who had taken an interest in the wellbeing of the working

classes—Mr. Maurice—had established a Working Mau's College, to give the working men of London who are employed nearly all the hours of the day in their various trades—to give them in the evening the same advan- tages which are offered to the higher classes in our Universities and °alleges. The scheme is succeeding, and the members are burning to acquire the in- atruction offered them. What has been done in London might be done—to a less extent, of course—in any other part of England Some might be inclined to ask how it was that he could attend there to talk about me- chanics' institutes and matters of such comparative unimportance, when the minds of men throughout the country should be engaged upon the war which is going on in the East ? He could tell them, in truth, that this contest is a contest of civilization against barbarism. They would be fighting the Em- peror of Russia better in that room by sound education than they would oven in the fields of the Crimea. If they looked at numbers, they must be beaten ; if they looked at brute force, they could not win the conteat—victory must arise from the righteousness of their cause. If, then, we are fighting the battle of civilization, it is not the brute strength that will succeed, but the force and influence of mind.

Mr. Lascelles put in a word in favour of reformatory institutions ; and spoke of one recently established in that part of Yorkshire, for which Lord Cardigan had given the land. Mr. Beckett urged them to promote education, and not to forget that the strength of England could not be in- creased by the addition of territories, but by the growing intelligence of the people, and the social prosperity of all classes of the community.

The annual meeting of the Northern Union of Mechanics Institutions was held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Tuesday last, and was celebrated by an exhibition of works of art, a conference, a dinner, and a soiree, with a concert of music in the intervals of the speeches; Earl Grey being the chairman at the dinner, and delivering a speech also at the soiree. He pointed to the advantage derived from union, in itinerant libraries, of greater value than any which a single institution could col- lect; he backed the recommendation of a report presented at the confer- ence, that the same principle should be applied to illustrations for lec- tures. At some length he combated the prejudice, long since refuted, but still surviving, that in trade one man's gain is another man's loss ; be ascribed to that prejudice the narrowing influence which trade confessedly exercises over the mind ; inculcated the doctrine that in reality the gain of our neighbour is our own gain ; and he applied this to nations as well as to individuals. " Nations as well as individuals, in obeying the sub- lime precepts of charity and loving their neighbours, as they are taught in His holy word, are not only fulfilling a sacred duty, but doing that which is best for their worldly interests."

The election contest at Wells between Mr. Sergeant Kinglake, Liberal, and Captain Joliffe, Conservative, is expected to be a stout one. Mr. Kinglake announces himself as " a supporter of that Liberal policy which has of late years been successfully directed to the advantage and general welfare of all classes, and thereby secured that confidence which ought to exist between those in authority and the people at large." On the war he is explicit. It is a " just and righteous war," and ought to be carried on with vigour and untiring energy; and ho trusts that no tem- porizing policy will interrupt its progress until a peace is obtained which will justify the vast sacrifices made in this great cause.

The ordinary meetings in the provinces—agricultural and political— have not yet come to an end.

Near the close of last week, Mr. Evelyn addressed the members of the Dorking Agricultural Society after dinner, and gave them a history of the session, with comments on collateral subjects, such as the excesses of the newspapers, the cost of the war, the great loss of men, and the failure of negotiations. He trusted that the Government would be explicit with regard to the conduct of the war. When fair guarantees are obtained, our object will be accomplished. If we destroy Russia as a nation, the balance of power will be destroyed.

Mr. Collier addressed his constituents at Plymouth on Tuesday. His themes were the common ones, the war, and the Parliamentary session. It might be, he said, that the war is an instrument in the hands of the Almighty for accomplishing greater ends than we dream of; it might be the means of bridging over the moral gulf that had so long separated Eu- rope from Asia, and of subverting Oriental superstition and barbarism by Christianity and civilization. Ignorant though we are of those great re- sults, it is enough for us to do our duty. But war stops internal and administrative improvement, and in the past session little of this kind of work was done. Among other things, he made a humorous reference to the Ecclesiastical Courts, now as lively as ever.

Talk of the siege of Sebastopol! it was nothing to that of Doctors Com- mons. The siege of Troy lasted ten years—and even that was nothing to Doctors Commons, before which a whole generation has fallen, and died in the trenches. But he would continue to do duty in front of Doctors Com- mons : be would mine it; he would bombard it ; and he trusted that public opinion would bring a feu d'enfer, as Gortschakoff called it, upon the citadel, until it should be evacuated by the enemy, and the standard of common genie should wave over the ink-stained ruins of Doctors Commons.

Mr. Collier denied that be had accepted the Chief Judgeship of Calcutta. In fact, it had never been offered to him ; and if it had been, he should not have accepted it.

A very remarkable meeting was held at Birmingham on Tuesday, to consider and provide the best means of securing a rigid observance of the fundamental rules of the British and Foreign School Society-, especially at its Central Institution, the Borough Road School. Mr. Mark Phillips occupied the chair ; and a great number of conspicuous Dissenters, lay- men and divines, including many Unitarians, were present. The charge is, that the original intentions of the founders of the society have been systematically violated, and rule fourth especially so. That rule enjoins, "that no catechism or peculiar religious tenets should be taught in the school, but every child should be enjoined to attend the place of worship to which his parents belonged." The meeting passed a resolution, that the British and Foreign School Society had been perverted from its original object by the systematic inculcation in the Borough Road School of peculiar creeds ; and that its perversion from national to sectarian objects is a great wrong, which should be repelled by every lawful prac- ticable means. A committee was appointed to carry out the resolution.

The shipwrights of Southampton who have been paid by the day, at the rate of 5a., have struck for an advance of le. a day ; but the larger number, paid by piece-work, have remained at their posts. The story of "Alice Grey," as evolved by the Wolverhampton Police in- vestigation, becomes quite epic. The offence charged against her at Wol- verhampton was penury. She had falsely sworn that two boys had stolen her purse ; but being recognized as a woman who had performed a similar feat at Birmingham, she was arrested, and several talbotype likenesses of her were taken from a daguerreotype likeness in her possession, and sent to several towns. The consequence was the arrival of letters identifying the woman as a systematic swindler. The earliest trace of her appears at Dub- lin ; where, an 1849, calling herself Armstrong, she charged a man with robbing her, but failed; and having been twice convicted of felony in Ire- land, she came to England. She passed herself off in Yorkshire and Derby- shire as a clergyman's daughter, and lived in clover by the cheat until dis- covered. She presented herself at Canterbury as a Roman Catholic perse- cuted by a Baptist father. At Glasgow, Greenock, Bristol, Bath, London, she brought charges of robbery of her imaginary trunks and purses, against various persons ; sometimes causing their conviction, nearly always obtaining money from the benevolent. In London she robbed a mistress, and after- wards pretended that her trunk had been stolen. Mr. Goodman of the Man- sionhouse, induced by her pitiful stories, paid her passage to Ireland. In Chester, on the 1st October, she again brought charges of robbery, and ob- tained money to pay her passage to Birmingham. Her aliases were many : in Dublin, Armstrong; Valaagow, Anastasia Carter ; in Flintshire, Anas- tasia Huggard; in London, Mary Anne O'Brien, and Jane Tureen ; at Wolverhampton, Alice Grey. When she was asked at Wolverhampton whe- ther she had any question to put to the witnesses, she told the Magistrates to "Go to hell' ; and at the close of the examination, instead of leaving the court by the ordinary way, she suddenly leapt on the lawyer's table, and so out by the "private door." "Alice Grey" is now in Stafford Gaol.

Thomas Tanner has been sent to prison by the Maidstone Magistrates for six weeks for this strange offence—" sleeping under a tent," contrary to the Vagrant Act.

Mr. John Tremenhere Johns, son of the Vicar of Crowan, Cornwall, a commoner of Pembroke College, Oxford, has been drowned in the Isis. He and two other collegians were rowing in "outriggers" or "canoes"—dan- gerous boats, very liable to upset : in trying to turn his boat after some "larking" with one of his friends, Mr. Johne's boat upset, and he was plunged into deep water. No one was near who could swim, and an hour elapsed before the body was got out. A Coroner's Jury returned a verdict of "Accidental death" ; and recommended to the University authorities some further precautionary measures for the rescue of persona who fall into the water, and for the early application of means of resuscitation to those appa- rently drowned, by having the "house boat" moveable instead of moored in the over.

An accident occurred on the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, near Cara- forth station, on Sunday evening. A bale of wool had fallen, unobserved, from a goods-train ; a mail-train ran against the obstruction ; the locomotive was separated from the train, and the passenger-carriages were divided into two portions, which fell down opposite sides of an embankment. Four pas- sengers were severely hurt, but no one was killed.

Traffic has been temporarily interrupted on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, between Peterborough and Grantham, by a portion of the Stoke tunnel giving way. No accident occurred. While the tunnel was obstructed, the passenger-trains ran over the Lincolnshire " loop " line ; but on Sunday even this was closed for some hours by the breaking-down of a "coal-train.

in. Sunderland, since the first week in August, there have been 114 cases of cholera, and 68 deaths from it : the disease has now disappeared.