Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1893 — SOMEWHAT STRANGE. [ARTICLE]

SOMEWHAT STRANGE.

ACCIDENTS AND INCIDENTS OF EVERY DAY LIFE. Queer Facta and Thrilling Adventures Whleh Show That Truth Is Stranger Thau Fiction. Thr German village of Grambke is greatly excited over a case of persistent somnolency in the person of the daughter of one of the town officials. The girl, a pretty, slender child of some thirteen years of age, has been in a continual sleep since the second week in May, and even now does not show the least trace of arousing from her protracted slumber. During the first week of her enforced sleep the family seemed grieved to the verge of distraction and all was mourning in the house where the child lay in the embrace of “death’s twin brother.” After awhile, however, when it was noticed that she would swallow liquid nourishment, theii fears for her safety seemed to abate to a certain degree, and now, after a lapse of more than half a year, the family go about their daily labors as if the little maid were realty dead and half forgotten. Highest medical authorities have been consulted, but all efforts to keep her awake have resulted in total failures. A factory for the manufacture of petrified human corpses has, it is alleged, been discovered in Fresno, Cal. At least four petrified people are said to have been manufactured and shipped to museums from this place, it may be remembered that a petrified man created considerable talk in Utah last fall. and that reports of the curiosity were printed in Eastern papers. The thing was seen by natural history experts and pronounced a fraud, but it netted considerable money for the “miners” who discovered it. The objects were very carefully made, the bones of the arms and legs being hollowed out, and in one case one arm and a foot was broken off to show the internal structure. The fake factory, it as said, stole a genuine mummified man, a dried body found on the plains, from the Health Officer of Fresno, fixed it up a little, and shipped it to a museum in the East.

Within a mile or two of D :wittev|lle, 3S. Y., Jive two old maiden ladies, Misses Lucinda and Martha Skinner, respectively seventy-four and seventy-six years old, who have lived together for the past forty-seven years without speaking to each ether. The two inherited the house in which they reside from their father in 1842, and quarreling a year or two after, divided households, though remaining under the same roof. Each has done her own cooking and waits an herself even in illness, never entering the rooms occupied by the other—in fact, leading as separate lives as if dwelling, in different counties. Neither ever speaks of the other, and no explanation has ever been made as to the quarrel that occasioned this peculiar family arrangement, though the neighbors declare that the cause was a disagreement over a stewpan, worth perhaps fifty cents.. Both sisters are worth in their own right over SIO,OOO. E. L. Wakeman, the American newspaper man, gives a bit of his London experience as follows: u ln London and other British cities the American will' notice little signs at street-corners, in crowded, narrow thoroughfares, in parkways and at all sudden turnings traversed by vehicles, reading. ‘Keep to the left.’ Some years ago when I first noticed this it worried me. I wanted to understand it, and, like a true American, perhaps protest about it a little. I approached a London policeman, with the earnest inquiry : ‘Beg pardon, officer, but might I ask why, in London, everything goes' “To the left”f Like one of Mrs. Jarley’s figures, his head moved stately. He regarded me one awful official moment with contemptuous pity. His head moved back again. Then, with withering scorn, he answered: ‘An’ w’j shouldn’t it?’ I had never thought of that.”

The inaccuracy of women with regard to their age is the subject of some curious testimony by a French President of Assize. The only instances in which he finds correct dates given by women ore when they are under twenty-five or over eighty-five. At these periods of life, he says, they are to be trusted. At all other periods the sure controlling tendency is to understate. The magistrate has been able to give a rule for guidance. He finds that female prisoners invariably state their ages as twenty-nine, thirtynine, forty-nine or fifty-nine, and from this remarkable circumstance be deduces his rule. If their ages are in the forties they boldly set them down in thirties, but, conscience asserting itself, they keep as near the truth as they can and fix them at thirty-nine. Not many months ago an account was received from Russia of the bringing to life by means of the application of electricity of a patient who had apparently died from the effects of lightning stroke. A resuscitation of a different character, although by the same agency, has just been effected in Scotland. A man who was bathing was seized with cramps and sank, being two minutes below water. For some time after he was rescued life was thought to be extinct. An electrical apparatus was procured, and the current was passed between the nape of the neck and the heart. Within a very short time animation was restored aud the man soon recovered.

A couple of weeks ago, says a Glasgow paper, a man in that city was so carried away by the “Yum-Yum’’ trio in the performance of The Mikado that, lacking a bouquet with which to express his admirat'on for the young singers, he pulled a whiskey bottle out of bis pocket and hurled it on the stage. He had previously emptied the flask. But this was not regarded as an extenuating circumstance by the magistrate, who sentenced him to thirty days’ imprisonment for the offence. Pitti Sing, who was struck on the knee by the admirer’s tribute, is at present in the Glasgow hospital. The ocean mariner dreads a derelict and is grateful when our government gets fresh track of these dangerous old vagrants and tells the marine world about where they drift. Tnere is one ship wandering around that has become famous. She is the American steamer Wyer G. Sirgent, abandoned March 31, 1831, laden with S2O,COD worth of mahogany. She was from Mexico bound for New York. She has already drifted sine? being abandoned off Cape Hatteras over 5,000 miles. IT seems very strange that people will persist in keeping pets that are dangerous to their own lives and the lives of those about them. One of the latest of such cases to comt :o the front is that of the Dells, of Cripple Creek, Col., who recently brought a young mountain lion from their ranch to their home there, and kept him chained in a kennel in the yard. The other day some little children were playing about near where the lion was lying before his kennel, and one of them * four-year-old boy, ran up close

to the savage beast. In a moment the lion was upon him, and before the- baby could be rescued he was horribly mangled by the animal’s teeth and claws. The beast was killed, and the Dells have been arrested. As interesting variety of the widely diffused “lost mine” mysteries is engaging the attention of prospectors in the region around Pueblo Nuevo, Durango, Hex. A burro (donkey) loaded with SA,OOO worth of bar silver started as one of a train from a mine near Pueblo Nuevo for Durango. Somehow it became detached from the train among the mountains and, unobserved, wandered away. All the efforts of the drivers and guards to find the burro and the silver have so far failed, although their vigorous search for it has been joined by the prospectors and the people generally in the vicinity. Practical railroad men account it a great triumph that they have knocked out the old theory that every engineer must have his own pet engine and must not be asked to run any other. Until only a few years ago this was the rule even on the greatest roads. Each engineer grew accustomed to and fond of an engine and believed he could get good work out of it, while a stranger to it would be sure to have the same trouble that he would expect with a strange engine. That is all changed now, and engineers are expected to leave their sentimental notions at home and take out whatever engine they are assigned to. A citi7.es of La Grande, Wash., had his attention drawn, in some unexplainable way, to a watch which a stranger, standing on the depot platform, drew from his pocket. He asked to be allowed to examine it, and exclaimed that it was his brother’s watch. The stranger told how he took the watch from the pocket of a Union soldier whose body he helped to bury after one of the battles of the civil war, over twenty-six years ago. The La Grande man dearly identified the watch as the one his brother wore when he set out for the front.

The heavy snow falls brought calamity in a curious way to the Chiuese pheasants that are to be found in some parts of the Northwest. The sleet and snow stuck to their long tails in such a way that the birds were unable to fiy. The country boys saw their opportunity and captured the birds by dozens. The birds are said to be worth $lO a pair alive and in good condition, and tliree boys in one family in Oregon caught nearly three dozen. A delegation of ladies of the W. C. T. U. visited the eounty jail at Canton, Ohio, one day recently, and held religious services. An hour after they left, William Green, who was committed for larceny, hanged himself to his cell door. He left a note saying that the prayers of the visitors had affeeted him, and that hie awakened conscience could not bear the contemplation of his own wickedness. Among the wilder tribes of the Caucasus every child is taught to use the dagger almost as soon as he can walk. The children first learn to stab water without making a splash, and by incessant practice acquire extraordinary command over the weapon. A peculiar Siamese-twin pair of pheasants was shot, on the wing, by a sportsman near Bellefonte, Penn., a few days ago. Both birds wtre perfectly developed, and were connected by a fleshy link, half an inch thick, just in front of the wings.