Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1885 — The River Jordan. [ARTICLE]

The River Jordan.

When we reached the Jordan I discovered that I had traveled all these thousand miles to view as foul a stream as courses its way through any countiy on earth. No wonder <Capt. Naaman indignantly refused at first to dip seven times in such a river. Indeed, we would scarcely apply the term river t® a stream eight feet wide and less than ten feet deep, with a eurrent as swift as a .mill-race. Moreover, the mosquitoes were so pestiferous that to dip in the Jordan, as some sentimental travelers insist upon doing, would be to invite a condition of the body resembling scarlet fever.— Eastern letter.

A writer in London Truth maintains that there is not really a clever man among all the crowned heads in Europe ar their families, The King of Spain, he declares, stopped all his intellectual growth when tee became a king. The Austrian Archdukes have elegant tastes but no ability. The King <of Italy lias nothing beyond occasional spurts of fine feeling, and in the ffloyal houses <of Saxony, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Bavaria there is (nothing above a second-rate dilettant. The brother of the Empress of Austria, who is an oculist, is no exception, for, though he has astonishing dexterity and firmness of hand, and a good memory, he is only a seeker after pathological curiosities, and is completely at sea on a new r case. The rest of the family, like the Empress herself, grew up amid horses, and she learned to speak English from her stableman. The Churchman says of a phenomenon which often causes astonishment: The reason of. the immunity which drunken men are said to enjoy from the consequences of accidents is attributed to the fact that the nerve centers which regulate the heart and vessels are so paralyzed in them as not to be affected by the shock which in sober men would have acted in them so violently as to stop the heart, arrest the circulation and cause death. A little boy discovered a bee crawling about on his hand. Finally, the bee stopped for a moment, and, after remaining stationary for an instant, stung the little fellow. When the cry of pain was over, the little child said to his mamma that he did not care for the bee’s walking about on him, but he did not like his sitting down on him.