Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1893 — A QUAINT RELIC. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A QUAINT RELIC.

One of the First Railroad Engines Ever Constructed. An exhibit at the World's Fair which is sure to excite no little attention is the old veteran locomotive John Bull, one of the first locomotives Jn 1831 Eobert L. Stevens, founder of the Camden and Amboy Eailroad in New Jersey, gave George Stephenson an order for a locomotive and the John Bull was result. For many years the engine was in active service just as it appears to-day. Finally, however, it was relegated to the side track and then stored away at Bordentown,

where it remained until taken out and started on its trip to Chicago, where it is now on exhibition. Together with the quaint old engine Robert P. Burt, of Janesville, Wis., who was the first to run the John Bull on the Camden and Amboy Road, will be' in Chicago during the

Fair. Mr. Burt guided the first locomotive that ever ran in the United States. This was the Comet and was run from Tamaqua •to l’ort Clinton, Ohio, ‘on wooden rails. Soon after Mr. Burt entered the employ of the Camden and Amboy

Road and ran the John Bull over the first iron rails laid in this country. Ever since that time until a few years ago Mr. Burt has been active in the railroad service of one road or another, and he is regarded as probably the oldest manipulator of the throttle in the world. He is a native of Glasgow and was born in 1810, but since the age of 18 he has lived in this country. A Remarkable Find. A dispatch from Berlin states that the Ornithological .Society has discovered in New Zealand a living species of bird almost twice as large is the ostrich and hitherto supposed :o be extinct. When the British settled in New Zealand they found skeletons of a bird sixteen feet high. The Maori natives called it the moa

and said that generations before it abounded in the country. Some of the natives asserted that a few of the great birds existed in lonely and almost inaccessible parts of the New Zealand mountains. The Maoris slaughtered the birds in great numbers. It is one of these birds that the Ornithological Society lias discovered.

Jaw-Breakers. Various papers are giving a list of the eight longest words in the language, as follows: Philoprogenitiveness, incomprehensibleness, proportionableness, transu bstanti ationa bl eness, suticonstitutionalist, honoribilitudinity, velocipedestrianastical, and proautionsubstantionist. But the last four are not found in the best dictionaries. Gorgeous! Charlemagne wore on state occ& •ions a silk gown worth SB,OOO.

THE OLD JOHN BULL.

ROBERT P. HURT.