Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1892 — Something: About Gingerbread. [ARTICLE]

Something: About Gingerbread.

We should be greatly surprised to see our everyday bread come to our tables tied with yellow and green ribbons or decorated with golden stars, but there was a time in England when so simple a thing as gingerbread was treated in a much more extraordinary way. In its earlier form gingerbread was simply a bread paste, with ginger and sweetening added. A very crude imagination went to work at it, and the market-places were crowded with gingerbread kings and queens, saints and roosters, adorned with gilt crowns and scepters, with halos, wings, and tails. Dispatches from Europe accumulate evidence that the cholera is spreading rapidly and causing a panic among the people of Southeastern Russia. The terrible disease seems to have started on its western march from Turkestan and Khorassan, a province of Northeastern Persia, where it is raging with frightful fatality. Thence, owing to lax quarantine regulations, it spread across the Caspian to Baku, the great petroleum shipping port, where the utmost consternation prevails owing to its alarming ravages. The TransCaspian railway has served as a medium for carrying the contagion from Russia in Asia, and there is now no question that It has gained a lodgment in European Russia. Notwithstanding the precautions taken at Tiflis, Sebastopol, and at the numerous frontier towns it found no difficulty in passing the barriers, and there is now no question that it is spreading in eastern Russia, as it has appeared at Tzaritzin, on the Volga, and other places, in which case the famine-stricken districts will now be afflicted with a fresh horror. It is even reported that the disease has made its appearance at Brindisi, on the heel of the Italian boot. This report, however, needs confirmation. Meanwhile there can be no doubt that Eastern Russia is afflicted with genuine Asiatic cholera of the malignant type in spite of the efforts, of the Russian Government to stamp it out with cordons of soldiers instead of sanitary measures.

“The unspeakable Turk” has forbidden the importation of quack medicines, Possibly “the Sick Man” has been experimenting, and has his own reasons.