Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 65, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1911 — Dickens’ Desk. [ARTICLE]

Dickens’ Desk.

Johannesburg’s riles (?->d Progress. If any one gifted with prescience a generation ago had written out the story of Johannesburg’s rise and progress he would hare been regarded as a burlesque Jules Verne. For a city to spring up in the center of South Africa in twenty j’ears. to attract a quarter of a million settled population and crowd an enormous municipal development within a single decade sounds certainly more like imagination than fact So does the arrangement by which she farms her black domestics out in a suburb ten miles away and runs special trains for them morning and night. But one secret of the town’s success rests on lier natural throne of forty mile ridge 6,000 feet above the sea and her nine hours of sunshine a day in perhaps the mildest and most equable climate in the world.—Pall Mall Gazette.

A writing desk which belonged to Charles Dickens was sold the other day at the mart in Wellington street. This is the desk whose reckless treatment by American railway porters he bitterly laments !u a letter addressed to John Forster, dated Dec. 22, 1867. “Nearly every case I have,” he writes, “is already broken. When we started from Boston yesterday I beheld, to my unspeakable amazement, Scott, my dresser, bearing a, flushed countenance against the wall of the car and weeping bitterly. It was over my smashed writing desk." Among other relics of the novelist which will come under the hammer is the cane chair used by him in his private office when he edited All the Year Round.—Westminster Gazette.