Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/217

 appointed in his place pending His Majesty's pleasure. A new Judge-Advocate, Mr. Richard Dore, arrived in the colony in May 1798. He officiated in the magistrates' as well as in the higher Civil and Criminal Courts. In the Supreme Court Library in Sydney is preserved a small vellum-bound book which records many of Dore's decisions in the petty sessions.

The entries are sometimes strange. A man is charged "with neglect of duty, and as it appeared that he was of an indifferent character, the gaoler was ordered to give him twenty-five lashes and discharge him." Two women appear; one, charged with "cruelly beating the other with a glass bottle and cutting her head, pleading a provocation in mitigation, the magistrates recommended the parties to withdraw, and accommodate the matter between themselves." 24th Oct. 1798.-A convict was brought, charged

"on a violent suspicion of feloniously and privately stealing from His Majesty's public stores in Sydney a cake of soap, and secreting about his person in order to take away the same. The soap was produced, and proved to be of the same quality as that belonging to the stores; but as the act and fact of stealing was not sufficiently established in law, the said was sentenced to receive fifty lashes and to be discharged, in order to return to his duty as a servant of the government."

Another man is charged with "embezzling some stone, the property of government; but as there seemed something of rancour and malice in the accusation, the prisoner was ordered to work out an equal quantity of stone as that carried away. A woman was accused of stealing a flat- iron from a "house (into which she had come on Sunday last under pretence of lighting a pipe) during Divine service, and the property having been found upon the prisoner, and no defence being set up, she was ordered to have an iron collar round her neck for a fortnight, and to sweep the gaol for a month from this day." Another woman, pleading inability to pay (the jurisdiction of the magistrates was limited to £10) on account of "various misfortunes and illness which prevented her attending on Saturday last, it was ordered that the debt be paid in the next corn harvest." On the 15th Sept. 1798 Dore and his brother magistrate Balmain sternly ordered the discharge of a prisoner arrested "without a specific charge," and the gaoler was peremptorily commanded on no "account what-