Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1910 — QUEER STORIES [ARTICLE]

QUEER STORIES

England’s first Sunday newspaper appeared in 1780. It has been found in Nova Scotia that the lobster’s chief enemy is not the dogfish but the lobster.

One of the tricks in the fur trade is to insert white hairs in foxes and sables to make “silver foxes.” The industry of making lebkuchen, or honey cake, is worth to the German city of Nuremburg about one million dollars a year. In Louisiana the law permits “a widow to .marry again only provided she has waited ten months after the death of her husband.

Sand is the curse of Portuguese East Africa. It blocks the rivers and harbors and stretches in a vast sea toward the interior, effectually cutting off the coast towns from the highlands. Besides.'lt makes the problem of transportation the bugbear of the planter.

Nearly $1,000,900 worth of timber was imported into Natal in 1908. The country is practically treeless, so far as there is apy commercial value in the timber. . i . Up to 1789 the chief Water works of New York city - was in Chatham street, now Park row. The water was carted about the city in casks and sold -from carts.

It was so cold in New York part of the winter of 1779 that residents tn the vicinity were compelled to cut down the. tall trees that stood at what is now th* head of Wall street to make kindling wood.

Yaddo, the Saratoga home from which Spencer Trask started on his fatal trip to New York, is one of the show places of the spa town. It derive* it* name from the O f a little daughter of the Trask*. When bridge over th* picturesque *h*et of

water which lies near the home, she pointed and said: “Yaddo,” which was as near as her baby tongue could get to the word “shadow,” and she did not know that the childish utterance had -given a name to the place. “If I had my way,” Dr. Macnamara once confessed to an interviewer, ‘J should be singing in ‘Carmen’ instead of making speeches from the treasury bench. But, unfortunately, the British public thinks a great deal more of a man who can make a bad speech than a man who can sing a good song."—Westminster Gazette. Curious customs are noted among the Mijus, a little known Asiatic race, by an explorer, who writes: “Though living on the borders of Thibet, no trace of Buddhism is found among them. Their religion is animistic and consists in the propitiation of the various spirits to whom sickness, failure of crops and such like calamities are attributed. The propitiation takes the form usually of the sacrifice of a fowl or a pig, a small portion being set aside for the spirit, the rest going down the throats of the offerer and his family.”