Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1894 — SOMEWHAT STRANGE. [ARTICLE]

SOMEWHAT STRANGE.

ACCIDENTS AND INCIDENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE. QaMr Facts and Thrilling Advanturas Which Show that Truth is Strangar Than Fiction. Two subjects for Miss Mary Wilkins live at Peterboro, N. H., says the Providence Journal, Elvira and Elmira Fife, who probably are the oldest twins living. Next August they will be 88. At the age of 14 they entered the employ of a local manufacturing company, and for sixty years they remained on its pay roll, the maximum wages earned being 99 cents per day, and the minigium J 1 cents for three days’ labor. Th%y have never ridden on a railway train, although the Boston and Maine road runs its cars within ten rods of their door. They have never been separated more than seventy hours at any one time in their lives, and cannot endure the thought that death will summon them singly. Although living in the same house and eating from the same table, they have always lived separately: that is, each has cooked her own meal. If one had a boiled dinner the other had a boiled dinner, and it was not cooked in the same pot either. If one had a turkey the other would have a little larger one, and so in everything they vied with each other to see who would live the best. Mrs. Clandia Herrera died in San Francisco recently at the remarkable age of 120 years. She w r as a Mexican, and for some time had made her home with her friend, Mrs. Petro R. I. Richeri. Mrs. Herrera was born in 1774 at Rial de Jesus Maria, Mexico. When Mrs. Herrera came to San Francisco at the time of the gold excitement she was even then a woman of 75 years old. She had no means, and her husband being dead, she had her own way to make in the world. But with the spirit of a young girl she set about the task; she never w r avered, but all through the long years that followed she earned her living by doing day’s work about the city, especially among the Spanish, for she could speak English but poorly. She continued to work to within twenty days of her death —washing, ironing and carring buckets of water with ease. Mrs. Herrera talked very little of her early life to her friends, but she occasionally spoke of incidents that happened 100 years ago. She knew Santa Ana when he was a boy and afterwards when ho was President of Mexico.

Physiognomists will do well to study an article in Blackwood’s Magazine. The compressed lip so loved and so often misinterpreted by novelists, says the writer, is a sign of weakness rather than of strength. It tells of perpetual conflicts in which the reserves are called into the fray. The strong will is not agitated into strenuous action by the small worries of the hour, and the great occasions which call for its whole forces are too few to produce a permanent impress of this kind upon the features. The commanding officer, assured of his men’s obedience, does not habitually keep his lip muscles in a state of tension. Look at the sea captain, the most absolute monarch on earth. He carries authority and power in his face, but it resides in his eye and the confident assurance of his easily set mouth. Whoever saw a man commanding a man-of-war or driving a locomotive with the contentious lip of a school usher. The absent-minded man is at it again. He had been reading the egg story and decided to try the trick. The first thing to <do was to boil the egg. How many minutes? he asked himself, and going to the stove with an egg in one hand and his watch in the other, he dropped the latter in the hot water. Then placing the egg on the table, he sat down to read till the time was up. At the end of five or six minutes he was surprised to find the egg lying there before him, but supposing that he had himself taken it from the kettle and cooled it, he proceeded to crack and peel it. The consequence may be imagined. Finally he missed his watch. The house was searched high and low, and it was not till the following morning that the cook found it in the kettle, where it had been boiling for hours.

“I have a horse ;at home,” said a North Dakota farmer, “that has developed a great fondness for eggs, and who loses no opportunity to gratify Jus appetite in this direction. During the winter he has a comfortable stall in the barn all to himself, and, by his kind treatment of the hens, is often enabled to secure for himself a freshly laid egg. To begin with he makes a cosey-look-ing place in the hay with his nose, and when a hen comes near he lifts his head out of her way, stands very still and by his quiet behavior invites her to come into his manger and lay her eggs. If she accepts his invitation he is always sure to get the egg, and it is immensely funny to see the look of extreme satisfaction in his faee when he has eaten the egg. “Indians do not take scalps through cruelty,” said Col. E. K. Grimshaw, a retired army officer, to aSt Louis reporter, “but just as civilized soldiers fight for and preserve the captured battle-flags of the enemy as trophies and proofs of prowess in war. During the years I spent on the frontier I was forced to witness many such sickening scenes. The scalp is taken by making a rough circle of slashes around the skull, and then tearing off the broad patch of skin and hair by main force. It is a dreadful operation, and one never to be forgotten by those who have once seen it. The scalp is supposed to contain many magical powers, and is cured with the greatest care by him who takes it.” Some extraordinary but well authenticated stories of the Bank of Prance are related. One day a sheep ate up a hundred-franc note belonging to a butcher. The butcher ran into the house of a friend, seized a gun and shot the sheep. He had no sooner done so than the owner of the gun rushed up. “That was an expensive shot of yours for me,” he said. “What do you mean 2” asked the butcher. “Well " said

the other, “I had seventy franc* in bills hidden in the barrel of that gun!” The sheep’s carcass was pretty thoroughly searched, and enough of the pieces of the notes recovered so that the bank redeemed them all. A Portland (Me.) woman boasts of a cat with a propensity for playing in the water, and tells how it bothers her when she is washing dishes, by trying to get into the pan. The other day, after repeatedly driving the animal from the sink, it climbed up and baianced itself on the two faucets, close together, and amused itself by patting with its paw the rapidly issuing stream. It frequently drinks direct from the faucet, plunging its nose into the current regardless of Sts force, and has often plunged into the bathtub when it was half full of water. So far from fearing the contact of water, as cats usually do, this unique Portland pussy fairly revels in it. London Tid-Bits publishes a wonderful story of the achievements of a boy at the old German town of Zeltz. This boy owns a dog which he taught to pronounce thirty-one words, twen-ty-four German and seven French. The words are spoken one at a time, and only at the dictation of the young teacher. The “talking dog of Zeltz” is the wonder of Europe, and nothing similar has ever been known, except the dog which was exhibited in Holland in 1718. This old-time canine wonder could pronounce all the letters of the alphabet, except “1,” “m” and “n.” Miss Sophia Behrens, a young lady well connected in Minneapolis, has been adjudged insane and taken to the asylum at Independence. Her mania was that she was engaged to several young men of the city, whom she threatened with suits for breach of promise unless they came to time. Her letters became so frequent that it was decided to bring her before the Commissioners of Insanity. It Is a peculiar case. She even went so far as to have her wedding trousseau made.

Near Yankton, N. D., is the most remarkable family on this continent, perhaps in the world. It consists of father, mother and twentyfour children, and the mother of the brood is not yet 80 years old. She is a Norwegian woman and her husband is a Hoosier. The children were born triplets and the oldest of the lot is under 12 years of age. All of them are boys but three, one set of triplets being girls. Peter Gruber, of Oil City, who calls himself the greatest snake catcher in the State of Pennsylvania, had twelve live rattlers in a paper bag and was carrying them home, when they burst from the bag. One of them got around his neck, but in trying to strike at the man bit its own body and died. Gruber saved eleven of the reptiles. One of the quaint remembrances of Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Sea life is that of his Honolulu mouse. A small shelf hung over the couch whereon he used to lie when ill and trying to forget his pain in playing on the flageolet. On this shelf the little mouse would venture, and soon became so tame as to delight in the novelist’s caresses. London has a feminine drum and fife corps. It is made up of charming girls who meet at one another’s houses and practice under the guidance of a drum major from a Guards Regiment. What with these fair drummers and Miss Ethel Stoke’s women volunteers, there seems to be no lack of martial spirit in the English woman.

A Grand Haven (Mich.) man says that in 1875 he marked tbe backs of three turtles, cut off their heads and set them free. He asserts that a few days ago he caught one of the same creatures which had a fully developed head and only showed the result of the decapitation in an abnormal ridge around the throat. While Arnold LandgraJ was shooting at turtles in a pond near Rome, Jefferson County, Wis., one of his bullets glanced from the back of one intended victim and put out the eye of a little girl who was standing near. The shooting was regarded as an unavoidable accident, and Landgraf was not arrested. The life of 5-year-old Mary Gusenberry was saved by a dog. She had fallen into a pond, when a Newfoundland belonging to a neighbor jumped in and pulled her out. Now hex mamma forgives the child for stealing tidbits from the kitchen to feed Fido, whose friendship is at a premium in that family. Henry Martin, of Bonham, Tex., is said to own a horse that has an immoderate fondness for live chickens, catching them for himself and enjoying them as ordinary horses enjoy oats. He has destroyed the reputar tions of all the colofed people in tbe neighborhood. Policeman Steel, of Manchester, N. H., weighs 150 pounds. During a recent fire he carried down five flights of stairs a sick man who tipped the scales at 800. He was loudly cheered by the crowd. William A. Hall, of Worth, Ga. has a team of mules that are 27 years old. He has been driving them for twenty years, and they can be worked as hard as ever.