Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 September 1878 — PEOPLE AND THINGS. [ARTICLE]

PEOPLE AND THINGS.

Cyprus is the home of the cauliflower. Mb. Sankey is singing his way through England. Brigham Young’s favorite wife, Amelia has married again. Failures in England have been heavier this year than last A wealthy East Boston widow has eloped with her milkman. One can live on $2 a month in China. The thing is to get the $2. Certain locomotives are deemed unlucky, and drivers dread to travel on them. Colorado will have a surplus of only 40,000 bushels of wheat to export this year. Mr. John Walter, of the London Times, is among those selected for the British peerage. Mosquitoes are so thick in Stratford, Ct, that some of the farmers find it difficult to harvest their crops. A Fbanco-Jewish company has obtained a monopoly for the extraction of bitumen from the Dead eea. At Bath, Me., recently, a young couple were introduced, engaged, married and divorced—all within a week.

It costs the English Government $50,000 a year to repair the damage to insulators and telegraph wires by stonethrowing boys. Ole Bull is delivering farewell concerts in Norway, after which he will come to the United States and give a new series of them here. The Mexican Combate states that a strong force has been ordered to the frontier to prevent future invasions of Mexican territory by American troops. Swarms of venomous flies have made their appearance in and around San Andres Chalchicomula, Mexico, which have caused the death of whole flocks of sheep. A man was hung recently at Union Springs, Ala. Before the procession formed the military band played “Dixie” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Ex-Gov. Henry H. Haight, of California, died at the office of his physician, in San Francisco, where he had gone for medical assistance on account of sudden illness. A stranger had to carry his child’s body in a coffin through the streets of Portland, from the wharf to the depot, the other day, as the city fines any one not a licensed undertaker who conveys a body in a carriage. A bread-fruit tree has been acclimated in the State Capitol grounds at Sacramento, Cal., and is in healthy bearing. The fruit is pear-shaped, four inches long and three in diameter, with a cantaloupe flavor. Queen Victoria has her carriage seat arranged in such a manner that the motion of the vehicle sets it rocking. In this way she can keep up a perpetual bowing to the populace without exerting her royal spine. The earliest known English epitaph recorded is that inscribed about 1370 in the parish of Brightwell-Baldwin, Oxfordshire, to—John the Smith. Anagrams were considered rather the thing up to the time of James I.

Horrible murders have of late become as frequent in France as in the United Stites. A whole family, consisting of a man, his wife and two children, were lately found murdered in their rooms at Ribiere-au-Gay. A Baltimore lady, wiio had been exceedingly annoyed by boys who rang her door-bell and then ran away, set a trap for them by which a pail of water was to be spilled upon the next person who rang the bell. In a few minutes her pastor called and was deluged. The Scotch papers report that Mr. Rankin, a young Kilmarnock gentleman, has just completed a journey to London and back on a bicycle. The distance, 439 miles, was run in about six days, making allowance for stoppages. The longest run in one day was 112 miles.

A girl in a disorderly house in Edinburgh, learning that the police had been sent in, leaped from a secondstory window, and her leg came in contact with a spike on the iron railing, which ran quite through the limb and held her suspended in great agony until a blacksmith could be got to cut the railing.

A number of unemployed young men in San Francisco have combined to establish a laundry in opposition to the Chinese, who made laundry-keeping one of their chief industries. Some unoccupied public buildings have been offered them by the Common Council without charge for their experiment.

Each Speaker of the House of Commons receives a pension of $20,000 a year, with remainder to his eldest son, at whose demise it terminates; but there is only one ex-Speaker—Viscount Eversley, Charles Kingsley’s friend and neighbor—who has such pension, and he has no son. His successor, Mr. Denison, created Viscount Ossington, refused a pension. He died childless.

Among the candidates for the Presidency of the French republic in 1880 are Due d’Aumale and Leon Gambetta. Marshal MacMahon will be pushed for re-election by one party, d’Aumale by the Orleanists or Monarchists, and Gambetta by the Radical Republicans. The Bonapartists hope that the political differences of 1880 will bring the Prince Imperial to the front as a sort of compromise candidate. Last year 308,665 British vessels entered at ports in the United Kingdom, 192,003 being sailing vessels and the remainder steamers. In point of tonnage two-thirds of this total were under steam. There entered into British ports from France 10,922 vessels; from Russia, 4,980; from the United States, 4,496. The extent of the Russian trade with England will surprise many. London had 9,253 foreign entered, against 4,184 at Liverpool. A suggestion is made by a correspondent of a French paper that bodies might with advantage be buried in the sea, which he considers to be the natural cemetery for the dead. He proposes that funeral boats, large enough to contain several bodies, be periodically dispatched from convenient places on the seashore, and that the bodies be committed to the deep at such a distance from the land as will prevent all possibility of their interfering with the public health.