Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1890 — The Two Little Mittens. [ARTICLE]

The Two Little Mittens.

The famous Physick Garden in ChelBea, England, who.-e preservation is now a matter of discussion, has 20,000 different herbs and plants. Japan is a remarkably productive country. Its area is less than California, while its cultivated land is only one-tenth of its acreage; yet its products support a population of eightyeight million. Th,f. newspapers are now trying to find the man who spent the most days in rebel prisons during the late war. So far as heaid from yet, E. W. Ware of Bangor, is ahead, he having suffered 600 days in Charleston, Columbia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Goldsboro and Greensboro prisons. Instead of increasing the weight of locomotives to secure better traction, efforts are being made to use the electric current, and experiment has demonstrated that the passage of a current through the driving-wheels increases the traction far beyond what additional weight accomplishes. If a teaspoon is placed in an empty glass, boiling hot water can be poured into it without breaking. A fork will not serve the purpose at all, as it is something in the shape of the spoon that concentrates the heat of the boiling water in itself. This is worth knowing by hot water drinkers, as the water is far more palatable in a glass than in a cup. The little English sparrows have learned a new dodge since electric lights replaced gas in New York City parks. When the current is turned off at dawn the bottoms of the globes are filled with hundreds of insects which have been attracted by the light and killed. The sparrows come around after the globe has cooled off, slide down the carbons and devour the insects. Prof. J. H. Lewis, of St. Paul, a noted archaeologist, has recently been making explorations around Jamestown, N. D. He has surveyed hundreds of earthworks and embankments ■which show an advanced knowledge of architecture, while the precision with which they are constructed shows great intelligence and care. Most of these mounds are filled with bones of people who lived ages ago and concerning whom history gives no clue. A will made by Frederick the Great in 1741, during the first Silesian war, is printed in the first volume of “The Wars of Frederick the Great,” just published in Germany. It reads as follows: “I am only King so long as I am free. If they kill me I wish my body to be burned in Roman fashion and my ashes to be inclosed in an urn at Rheinsburg. In this case Knobelsdorf [his architect] shall construct a monument for me like that of Horace of Tusculum.”

The wife of Senator Davis, of Minnesota, is able to make this extraordinary statement: “When ten years of age my aunt bought me a pattern, some navy-blue cloth and some black'velvet, and told me I must make myself a gown, which I did, greatly to her satisfaction and my own and the envy of my little playmates. From that time to the present day I have never paid one cent to a dress-maker or milliner, nor lias any one else done so for me. Every dress, hat and bonnet I wear is made and trimmed by my own hands.” It is not generally known that Prince Bismarck has an adopted son, now twenty years of age, and a Frenchman. One evening during the Franco-Prus-sian war when the Chancellor entered his sleeping apartments, outside of Paris, he found a baby boy asleep on his pillow. The mother had left a note saying that her husband had been hilled at Sedan, and that despair and want had forced her to give up her child. Bismarck sent the child by special nurse to Berlin, and subsequently had him educated, and he is now a model young man and devotedly attached to his benefactor. An Episcopal clergyman of Indiana tells this as a true story: Recently one of the prominent members of his parish died. After the funeral the widow found great comfort in telling her Deighbors about the many virtues of her late husband, even mentioning that he took greatest delight in playing •cards as an innocent pastime. She must have been thinking of him as he appeared in his “customary attitude,” for she said: “Jacob looked so well when they opened the coffin at the church. He had not changed one particle. There was, O, such a heavenly expression on his face. He looked just as if he held four kings.” When standing within a few yards of the gun’s muzzle at the time of discharge, a person would be amazingly astonished were he only able to see the shots as they go whizzing by. Experiments in instantaneous photography have proved to us that the shots not only spread out, comet-like, as they fly, but they string out to a much greater distance than they spread. Thus, with a cylinder gun, when the first shot of a charge reaches a target that is forty yards away, the last shot is lagging along ten yards behind. Even with the chokebore gun some of the shot will lag behind eight yards iu xorty. They are having a hard time out in ’Washington, Kan., over a meteor. It

fell on Miss Kelsey’s farm, and a hired man named January, who saw it fall, dug it out. He thought meteors a profitable crop, bought it from Miss Kelsey’s agent for $25 and sold it to the State university for S6OO. Miss Kelsev was away from home when the thing was sold, and now comes back and claims that her agent had no right to dispose of it. She proposes if necessary to bring suit for it on the ground that in Kansas meteors come properly under the general head of farm products, claiming it as her just and due meteor right, so to s peak. Why so many bald-headed men are bachelors is thus explained by a recent writer: “There is a great deal of capillary attraction in love. Girls adore a handsome suit of glossy hair; it is lovely. And when a lover comes to woo her with the top of his head shining like a greased pumpkin he is at a disadvantage. Just as the words that glow and thoughts that burn begin to awaken in her bosom a sympathetic thrill she may happen to notice two or three flies promenading over his phrenological organs, and all is over. Girls are so frivolous. She immediately becomes more interested in those flies than in all his lovely language. While he is pouring out his love and passion she is wondering how the flies manage to hold on to such a slippery surface.

People who are afraid of lightning may be consoled by the knowledge that there is a thousand times the danger in the sewer pipes that there is in the thunder clouds. The deaths by lightning are few indeed. Who of the readers of this paragraph ever lost a friend that way ? Who of them hasn’t lost a score of friends by the less brilliant and less noisy destruction that comes up out of the drains ? The trouble with the lightning, or the trouble that it gives the people, is in its indescribable suddenness and its absolute uncertainty. You know neither when it is coming nor where it is going; all you feel certain about is that some storms leave a number of catastrophes to mark their course. The caprice of the lightning defies the explanations of science, and there is no predicting beyond a few generalities. This much it does seem safe to repeat, even in the lively lightning season, that the increased use of electricity, with the multiplicity of wires, has tended to fewer fatal strokes of lightning in cities.

A Brooklyn manufacturer paid a bill without a murmur the other day simply on account of the way it was worded. His engineer found that the hot water pump would not work and sent for a machinist. The latter bjthered with it half a day and said it must come apart. This meant a stoppage of the factory for a long time. It was suggested that a neighboring engineer be sent for, as he was a sort of genius in the matter of machinery. He came, and after studying the pump a while he took a hammer and gave three sharp raps over the valve. “I reckon she’ll go now,” he quietly said, and, putting on the steam she did go. “The next day, says the manufacturer, “I received a bill from him for $25.50. The price amazed me, but when I had examined the items I drew a check at once. The bill read this way: ‘Messrs. Blank & Co., Dr. to John Smith. For fixing pump, 50 cents;for knowing how, $25.’ Had he charged me $25.50 for fixing the pump I should have considered it exorbitant. But 50 cents was reasonable, and I recognize the value of knowledge, so I paid and said nothing. ”

He had snubbed his wife and scolded his children, and had gone off down to business in a frame of mind that made some friends, and all the dogs, go a block out of their way to avoid him, all because some trifling thing had gone wrong, and there was no one who had the courage to tell him he was acting like a brute. And then right in his way, spread out on the sidewalk, the two little thumbs curled up, lay a little wee pair of black mittens—baby mittens, with dimples and curves left in them. He looked quickly up the crowded walk and saw a slender woman hurrying along with a toddling girl baby by the hand, and he tried to overtake them and shouted, but they were lost in the crowd, and he took the two little mittens with him and laid them on his desk. They were so tiny that they looked almost as if they were, made for a doll, but no doll’s hands had left those creases, and it didn’t take an expert either to tell that it was the hand of a future woman that had made those little curves in the wrist and palm. “What have you there?” asked his business partner. He answered ’ briefly, “treasure trove,” and finally tucked one in each pocket of his vest. But not before he had noticed, however, that the ball of each dear little thumb was neatly darned, and that the line of life on the tiny wrist had worn through and had been covered with a network of patient mending. Half a dozen times a day, when he was alone, that man looked at the little mittens, then put them away and went on with his invoices and calculations. And when he went home at night he met his wife with a kiss, and romped with the boys, and at the supper table he took out the little fugitive things and they went the rounds. The boys laughed. His wife looked at him with shining eyes. “Yes, dear,” he said gently, “Nellie would have been large enough to wear them if she had lived. ” This was the secret. The little mittens had performed a mission, and will be kept as mascots. In Egypt lovers pledge their troth by touching thumbs. When, however, the girl touches her thumb to her nose and wiggles her fingers, the young fellow probably takes the hint and scoots.