Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1891 — YOUNG FOLKS' COLUMN. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

YOUNG FOLKS' COLUMN.

The conduct of the various African explorers gives rise to the theory that it is impossible to visit the Dark Continent and return to civilization without the loss of one’s good temper, The French vineyards have been ravaged by the phylloxera again, but that will not interfere with the supply of wine for America. Unfortunately for American consumer of French wine makers are not dependent upon the grape. * It is surprising what a number of American doctors discovered sure cures for consumption long before Koch qver thought of his. # It was very courteous of them to withhold the information until the German physician had made his announcement. Swak Gustafson, a laborer in the Illinois Central gravel pits at Cherokee, 111., has received news that a relative has died in Pennsylvania, leaving an estate valued at $3,000,000, which is to be divided among six heirs, of whom Gustafson is one. London to-day is five times as large as it was at the opening of the present century. From 900,000 at that time the population of London grew to 1,500,000 in 1830, and by 1855 it had increased to 2,500,000. Since 1855 it has more than doubled. Fob five years Japan has had postal savings banks, and the depositors have increased from ten thousand the first year to nearly four hundred thousand at present, and the deposits from less than sixteen thousand dollars to more than twenty millions. Venice is one of the poorest cities in Italy. It has 140,000 inhabitants. Of these no less than 40,000 have their names inscribed, on the books of the “Congregazione di Carita” as recipients of relief; that is to say, nearly onefourth of the population are paupers. ' Probably the oldest house in the United States is a decaying stone dwelling that stands in Guilford, tlonn. It was built in 1640 and is still occupied. In colonial times it did duty occasionally as a fort and was a place of refuge for settlers when King Philip was on the war-path.

Much of the confuson around a house is due to the boy getting ready to go to Sunday school. If every one does not wait on him promptly, he says no one takes any interest in his soul, but he finally arranges it so that he is too late, and remains away from Sunday school after all. In England they give their foot-ball players sls to S2O a week regular salary, with SI,OOO bonus at the end of the season if their conduct has been creditable. The plan of putting a premium up for good conduct has a wholessme effect. The plan might be tried on base-ballplayers. The Brazilian Government has repeatedly offered a liberal reward for a plan resulting in the abatement of the vampire plague, which in the provinces of Matto Grosso and Entre-Rios makes stock raising almost impossible. As many as twenty of these wiDged bloodsuckers often attack a cow in a single night. A legal light who is interested in the recent African horrors has called attention to a statute in force in England providing that “when any murder shall be committed on land out of the United Kingdom the criminal may be tried and punished in any part of England or Ireland where he may be apprehended.” Prof. Koch’s breakfast, which he takes shortly after 9 o’clock, would hardly please the palate of an American. It is composed solely of an uninviting white soup* into which he puts any amount of little squares of toasted bread. His dinner taken at 2, ccnsists of one course of meat and vegetables, one light sweet dish, and to finish all, a plate of soup. It is a wonder any of us ever accomplish anything. Until noon each day, we think what lots of work we intended to do to-day. Afternoon, we stop hoping for to-day, and spoil the rest of the day’s work in hoping and planning for to-morrow. Not one man in ten does more than half a day’s work each day, and yet we complain and worry every day that we w T ork so hard.

Men are laziest in the morning, and can do their best work three or four hours after they get up. The women, on the contrary, can do better work the first three or four hours after getting up than they can do at any other hour of the day. If anything happens to interfere with the first part of the woman’s day, the whole day is lost to her as far as work is concerned. The deepest*lake in the world is Lake Baikal, in Siberia. Its area of over 9,000 square miles makes it about equal to Lake Erie in superficial extent; its enormous depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 feet makes ite volume of waters almost equal to that of Lake Superior. Although its surface is 1,350 feet above sea level, its bottom averages over 3,000 feet below the same level. Fob youthful vim in old age Benjamin Capen, of Eastport. Me., certainly stands without a peer. In his seventy -

fifth year, he is able to out-skate any man, young or old, in the town. Every afternoon and evening he can be seen on the ice, and the American eagle he cuts on the glassy surface is done in thirty seconds and is perfect in outline. He beats ex-Vice President Hamlin in the matter of agility. Mbs. Stanley is seeing America as no other English woman ever did before. In Buffalo the regular boarders of the hotel where Mrs. Stanley and her mother stayed quietly fitted up their apartment before their arrival with the costliest and most beautiful articles of furniture from their own rooms. For three days Dorothy and her mother simply marveled at the Oriental magnificence of American hotel life. A philanthropic woman of Pittsburg has established a home for tramps. Her idea is to give the wandering gentry a a place of refuge when they come to town and to endeavor to assist and reform them. No work will be exacted of them other than that of keeping the home clean. If they are also required to keep themselves clean the philanthropic lady will discover that her peripatetic friends will hunt some other boarding-house with all haste. They will not submit to indignities and hard labor at the same time for any home that can be offered them. Self-conceit is probably the greatest power that actuates men. A stage hand at the theater imagines that Booth cannot act, and tries it himself. The people laugh, but he really believes that he is a great actor who is not appreciated. A man talks in public; the people do not appreciate him, although they appreciate good public speakers, and he imagines that there is a conspiracy to keep him down. A man writes a piece; he has no reason to imagine that it is good, but if it fails, he grumbles and growls because “luck” is against him. No man can succeed at anything until he can criticise himself fairly. The rifle with which the regular and citizen soldiers of the country are equipped is much inferior to the rifles used by the soldiers of the chief countries of Europe and will be displaced by another pattern of modern power very soon. Experiments upon a new rifle are now making by the Government with gratifying success. Its caliber is thirty instead of forty-five and the velocity of its bullet is 2,200 feet per second, almost TftHce that of the present bullet, while its penetrative power is much greater. At a distance of 500 yards it will pass through sixteen inch pine boards one inch apart.

The late Gen. Alfred Howe Terry was more than six feet tall, and had light hair and blue eyes. His customary expression was quiet and gentle. He was scholarly in his tastes and versatile in his intellectual activities. Says one of his old comrades: “He had many literary tastes in common with mine, and had a select library in his tent to while away the tedium of the camp. Every evening he would send an orderly inviting us to his quarters, and we would read and discuss our favorites as we smoked, until fait in the night. Those were royal times, and General Terry’s friendship is something that I shall always prize.” When you go into the doctor’s office, the medical man is seized with the same sort of cunning that takes bold of a merchant when you enter his store; he wants to do business with ypu. He wants to see you take your pocket book out, and he wants some of the money it contains. That is his business ; he is simply human, like the rest of us, and wants his business to prosper. Therefore what he says is' liable to be tinged with selfishness. The impression that doctors are philanthropists who study medicine simply for the good they may do humanity, is only entertained by extremely foolish people. In dealing with a doctor, you must use as much judgment as in dealing with a horse trader.

The Boston Record tells a story of a prominent man in that city who exhibited a plant to a friend and when asked what it was replied, after a moment’s hesitation, that it was “a rare specimen of the Encyclopedia Britannica.” It is to be sincerely hoped that this is a pretty little fiction of some bright young man employed on the Record, but in view of the present state of Boston fiction one hardly dare 3 to believe in the hope he struggles to entertain. Boston fiction can not be said to be bright, and the scintillating story of the Record is, we fear, too truthful. The fear leads ohe to speculate upon the probable cause of the degeneration of Boston brain, and the speculation leads to thß remark that, in this day of Sabbatarianism and reform, when good people everywhere are struggling mightily to suppress evils such as drinking, smoking, or Sabbath recreation, some reformer should put his hand to the suppression of Howells and the Boston habit of intoxicating and weakening the brain by imbibing the intellectual drink which he places at the lip. Something must be done, and that quickly, ere our modern Athens follow Athens the ancient down the intellectual toboggan-slide and bury herself in the slush of barbarian stupidity. Mrs. Pollard, wife of the historian of the Lost Cause, is now a resident of New York. She is a creole by birth and is a fine-looking woman of middle age, with dark, expressive eyes and brown hair.

SOME SHORT SKETCHES OF INTEREST TO CHILDREN. BubbU Blowing;. We are all of us familiar with the ordinary bubble, and we have probably all had a try with a long clay pipe and a basin of suds, and succeeded more or less—principally less—in setting fourinch balloons afloat over some quiet neighborhood. It is possible that a few of us have filled such soap balloons with hydrogen, and by applying a light to them, have caused an explosion in mid-air. But how many of us have tried to attach a car to our bubbles ? This can be done easily after a little practice, and the sketches herewith make clear how to set about it. Get

an ounce glass tube from the nearest druggist, and cut out of thin paper whatever your fancy leads you to fix to the balloon. As something out of the ordinary lines, we give the exact size of an aeronaut we recently dispatched on a

cruise. Dis a small disk of paper proper size; F is a fine thread—proper length; below it is the paper figure, cut out of the brown wrapper of one of our monthly parts, and it is traced from the figure we used. To make the experiment a success, it is as well to remember the conditions. The bubble rises because the air it contains is lighter than that which surrounds it; it floats when the air is of the same temperature, it falls when the air within is colder than the air without. The air in the bubble comes hot from the lungs, and the greater the difference between that air and the air you breathe, the higher will the bubble go. In short, to have bubbles in perfection, you should

blow them in an ice room. Asitis not every one that can obtain the use of a meat storage safe for bubble blowing, let us make our first experiment in a cool room. Begin with working up a good, stiff lather, and the better the soap the better the suds for our purposes. Use your tribe as you Would your pipe, and blow dbwnward into the basin steadily and strongly. Take a good breath of air to begin with, and hold it for a second or two. Keep the point of the tube downward until you. have fixed on the disk in the way shown in the sketch. No gum or stickiness is required; all you have to do is to let the dry disk drop lightly on the wall of the balloon —the moisture will keep it in its place, jjrovided the knot of the cotton is small enough. If you pass the cotton through with a needle, and have the same sort of single knot as if sewing, the disk will answer all your requirements. As soon as the disk is firmly fixed, turn the tube gently upward, and away will go the bubble, aeronaut and all. It will not cross the Atlantic, but it will at least reach the ceiling, and if, on a cold day, you try it out of doors, you may get it to travel unchecked for several hundred yards.

What Mary Gave. She gave an hour of patient care to her little baby sister, who was cutting teeth. She gave a string and crooked pin and a great deal of good advice to the three-year-old brother who wanted to play at fishing. She gave Ellen, the maid, a precious hour to go and visit her sick baby at home, for Ellen was a widow, and left her child to its grandmother while she worked to get bread for both. She could not have seen them very often if our Mary had not offered to attend the door/white she wa°, away. But this is not all that Mary gave. She dressed herself so neatly, and looked so bright and kind and Obliging, that she gave her mother a thrill of pleasure whenever she caught sight of the young, pleasant face. She wrote a letter to her father, who was absent on business, and gave patient attention to a long story by her grandmother, and when it was ended made the old lady happy by a good-night kiss. Thus she had given valuable presents to six people in one day, and yet she had not a cent. Reader, what are you giving?— Our Little Ones. y lillgrliteii. '; It is hard for us, whethe r we are old or young, to see our best efforts pass unappreciated; and what older people feel, younger people say. - Little Mary, who is only 4 years old, had a new hat given to her, of which she felt very proud. On ihe following Sunday she wore it to church, but her pleasure d l the event was greatly lessened by the fact that a certain lad,

on whonq her childish affections were just then set, appeared not to notice her splendid adornment. Monday morning she saw him going by the house, driving a cow, and at once she clainbered upon the fence. “Oh, Ed,” she called, “that was me to church yesterday, with a new hat on!”— Youth's Companion. Her Ambition. A Kansas City school-teacher was one day asking her scholars what they wanted to be or do when they were men and women. Bhe received various answers. One child wished to be a farmer, another a merchant, another a banker, another a school-teacher, another a musician, and so on. Some of them answered simply, “I don’t know.” Finally she came to Susie Benley, a nice little girl of eight years. Susie arose and demurely replied, to the amusement and astonishment of the teacher, “I want to be a married lady, and keep house.”