Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 207, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1917 — Page 2

Faithful Old Fire Horse Makes Way for Auto ST. LOUIS. —A One, new- automobile ambulance, with equipment up to the minute, arrived at police station No. 1, Hanover street, the other day. With much snorting It backed into the garage. Stonewall Jackson, who had

horse to leap with joy at the sound of an automobile engine. But he wen too far; he did not really see his finish. Immediately before him is the rea - ization of the dream of his life—the fruition of the hopes of ten years. This week he will be taken to Red Acre farm, near Lexington, where in the green fields he will live again the happy days of his youth. The police departmen has assured for him a comfortable old age; it has made him a life pensione . Everybody in the North end knows Stonewall Jackson, the white horse with the one staring eye. In his time he has saved hundreds of lives. Though normally of phelgmatic disposition and somewhat leisurely gait, at the sound of the gong behind him he would leap out of himself, as it were, and display unsuspected speed. . In this uncertainty as to “form,” at least, he resembled some race horses. In other respects he was very different from a race horse. And even his best friends in the North end admit that the new automobile ambulance will do better work. *

Man’s Last Stronghold Is Ruthlessly Despoiled NEW YORK. —Trousers for women are really here. As a matter of fact, some of New York’s best dressers have been wearing the bifurcated dress for some time, but now that the gown manufacturers are exhibiting the models

to buyers from Painted Post and other corn-husking sections of the country, it (the trousers) looks as if they would become popular as feminine decorations. The invasion of women of men’s sacred prerogative has brought about a strong protest from the humble male. He can see nothing but his last vestige of superiority going by the boards. And with the death knell for old tradition sounded he is waiting for the announcement that he can store his

evening trousers in some safety deposit vault where they will be safeguarded. He, the mere man, also realizes that the time is coming when it will be impossible to tell who is who on the main street. When women took to tight-fitting breeches, ostensibly for rmlng, automobiling and motorcycling, men sighed and made little protest. W hen the fair ones took to overalls for farming and munition factory work and for repairing the limousine, men looked startled, but muttered something about “war necessity.” But when.they adopt evening dress trousers—good night. There is nothing left that is exclusive for men. When the opera and horse show and charity ball season arrives and the society page reporters jot down descriptions of what was worn, we can expect to read dabs like this: “Mrs. Highflyer Dash wore an elegant creation, the bodice consisting of pearls, diamonds and broadmindedness, supporting a dainty set of apple-green trousers, and an overdress of sheer Imagination.

Connecticut Fishermen Declare War on Sharks n RIDGEPORT. CONN. —A dozen large sharks were shot by fishermen, whose D livelihood has been menaced by the deep-sea invaders of the Soun Captain John Wirth of the sloop Mary and Ann, which made port again after a day’s cruise in pursuit of the man-

a battie resulting from the voracious appetites of the sharks in eating thel * own wounded. He saw two of the fish jump five or six feet into the air in a a shark became wounded and blood flowed the captain says that the water became a seething mass of white as the big fish rushed to devou the "'°" a n t^between two of thpip raged for five minute in front of the sloop off New Haven. The big fish repeatedly shot far out of the water. Fishermen arriving in Bridgeport report having sighted groups of! finned fish in various sections, the largest number seen at one time being • They said that the school was broken and that the groups were widely separflteXoncasuaßiesn have so far been reported at the beaches. Lookouts are nosted at various points where bathers congregate to give warning of the approach of the sharks, which invariably show their fins above water until nearly ready to strike at their prey.

Sleeper Lucky in Recovering His Agate Eye PHILADELPHIA -John Charles, aged forty-five, of 668 Eckert street, placed “ against the window of his room on the second floor when he retired. The humidity made him toss about in his slumber. He rolled ou o

the window. A fall of 16 feet to the pavement awakened him. Then he found his glass eye was gone. Clad only-in - his underwear he crawled about the pavement looking for the missing optic. Policeman William Bailey came along. Thinking Charles was demented, the officer asked what he was doing. “I am looking for my glass eye,” replied Charles. “I lost it when I fell

out of the window." ’ , TZZr-t. Charles and the policeman were searching for the eye on their napds and knees when Lieutenant of Police William Harris came along. Thinking the policeman and Charles were intoxicated, he - asked Bailey what was wrong. "This fellow lost his lamp,” replied the policeman Positive then that Policeman Bailey was intoxicated, Lieutenant Harria asked: “What kind of a lamp was it, electric or oil ?” and started to ring was ills glass eye,” said Policeman Bailey. ‘‘He lost It when he fell out of that window.” t “That’s different," said Lieutenant Harris, and he. too, got on his hands and knees. They found the eye. It bad not been damaged in the fall and Charles returned to bls room. .. - ’ •

IN THE CITIES

occupied the garage ten years under the impression that it was a stable, snorted also. He had been off his feed for days —ever since George McCard, his driver, had dropped a hint that his hay day was over and his gasoline day was about to dawn. “I see my finish,” said Stonewall Jackson to himself in horse language. Then he closed his one remaining eye in resignation. There was some basis for his pessimism. You cannot expect an elderly

eaters, reported the capture of three, which were taken to Mattituck, L. •L, by fishermen. One, he said, was 13 feet long and is believed to be the shark that attacked and tore the flesh of Jonathan Briggs, a Mattituck boy. He also reports that the big school first sighted has been up by the attacks of the fishermen and by encounters among the fish themselves, which are apparently ravenously hungry. Captain Wirth reports viewing

fHE EVENING REPUBLICAN. RENSSELAER. IND

FRIEND OF THE FIRE HORSE

tn Detroit Animals Showed Affection for the Man Who Cared for Them For Many Years. For 27 years Martin Cooney has been superintendent of horses for the fire departinent of Detroit, Mich., saya the News of that city. He has bought every horse used by the department In that time; he has tended them through sickness and has been obliged to end the agonies of many of them. So great has been his love for horses that he has never taken a furlough, or even kept his Sundays for himself. Night and day he has watched over the horses.

In winter, when the horses, steaming from their swift run to the fires, have stood and shivered us the blaze was fought, It was Martin Cooney who hurried to the scene, and saw that they were blanketed. Back in their barns, it was Martin Cooney who saw that they were rubbed down and made warm and comfortable. When their feet were sore it was Martin Cooney who dressed them, and when the strenuous life of fire department horses made them unfit for such service, Martin Cooney saw to It that they were sold to farmers and not to city drivers, who might abuse them. But the endless toils of days and nights has taken toll of Mr. Cooney, and recently he retired from active service. And because he Jias been a friend to horses he is glad that automobiles are replacing them for fire service in downtown Detroit.

“Pounding over hard, slippery downtown streets shortened the lives of the horses,” Mr. Cooney explained. “When we used them all over the city, the average life of a horse In the department was four or five years; now that they are confined to the environs their average Is five or six years. Of course some last much longer. There was one that lasted thirteen years, and Is now comfortable on a farm near Detroit. “When I joined the fire department we had about 130 horses. At one time we had 234 horses; that was the highwater mark. Now we have about 150, more than we had twenty-seven years ago, despite the great number of fire trucks. That is because Detroit’s outlying districts are more populous now than the entire city was then. “The horses knew me when I came Into any of the stations. 'They would whinny and crane their necks. I broke them in and they never forgot me. “The thing which makes me happiest Is that all old horses are sent to farms, ■where there are no hard roads to irritate their weakened feet. A horse is foo intelligent and too good a friend to be abused after its full period of usefulness is passed.”

How They Shoot in China.

Details of the battle In Peking between Chang Hsun’s ill-starred forces and the besieging republican troops Indicate that the hostilities were more exciting than dangerous, remarks the Salt Lake Herald-Republican. The dictator was surrounded by about 4,000 of his followers when he sought refuge in the Forbidden City, and the attacking party numbered at least five times as many. Chinese soldiers have never been noted for expert skill in handling firearms, as substantiated by the authentic report that “considering the enormous quantity of ammunition used and the number of troops engaged” the casualties were remarkably small, only ten killed and thirty wounded among combatants and three times the number of killed and wounded among “innocent bystanders.” For obvious reasons Uncle Sam was simply giving the Chinese sound and friendly advice when he told them to keep out of the way and harmonize their internal differences.

Master of Proportions.

An eager young teacher was reviewing the Sunday school lesson in a mission church in Brooklyn. The subject was “Moses and the Bush That Burned Without Being Consumed.” The boys of ten and twelve had been greatly interested in the story and were now eager to expose their knowledge. Answers followed her questions with the rapidity of a machine gun. “Now, Harry, it’s your turn.” “Yessum,” was the confident answer. Tell me what there was about this burning bush that was different from any bushes that have burned since.” The boy knew —you could tell from the snapping of his eyes—but he paused to formulate his words. “Why, ma’am, you see this here bush it burned up—but it didn’t burn down!” The teacher herself could not have explained it better.—Youth’s Companion. ’*■

The Boon of a Short Memory.

- A Canadian corporal writesjhat the condition of the “roads” often appears a perfect pandemonium until one gets used to it. One of th? strains that counts in this war. is on coming out of the trenches to go to a rest billet. Up in the line a man is keyed up to stand a bombardment, and there is a fierce joy in getting to close quarters with a bayonet. But when the relief is over, and the regiment is on- its way for four or five miles to rest billets, the stimulus is lacking, the pack §eem« doubly heavy, and the road is very hard to feet softened by three or four days of wearing gumboots in the mud of the trenches. In 24 hours, with a bath, a shaw, and dean kit, there will be different inen; for memory is mercifully short in this war, and the comforts or discomforts of the moment' are the things that count. *

TRAVELING SAND DUNES of PERU

THE remarkable sand dunes of the Peruvian desert have attracted the attention of every visitor to this arid region. The striking feature of these formations is that they slowly but constantly shift their position, always in the same direction. In the Geographical Journal of London, W. S. Barclay thus describes and explains these traveling sand dunes. Although the majority of the dunes are to be found in the western half of the Pampa, the subaerial weathering of the conglomerate bed from which they take their origin Is noticeable elsewhere along ther Peruvian coast. One of my most vivid recollections on the steamer voyage along the desolate coast from Lima to Mollendo is a vision, against the early morning sun, of a great flame-colored hill that seen through the coast fogs presented almost the appearance of a city on fire. This flame effect was, as I afterw’ards ascertained, due to sand and dust blowing across its upper ridges. * Starting from Mollendo the railway winds its way up the deeply eroded flanks of the coast hills. The hot air rising from the desert keeps back or dissolves the clouds which attempt to make their way across the Andean crests to the sea, and rain is reckoned to fall on this coast not more than once in seven years. When this occurs, however, its erosive effect on the soft, loose soil is striking. Watercourses 15 to 20 feet deep are cut in a few hours. One of these rare phenomena had taken place a few days before my visit. It does not pay the railway, when constructing its track, to allow openings for these infrequent cloudbursts, and one sees in consequence solid earth banks built along the hill flanks, damming gulleys of great depth extending sometimes a mile or more on the upside. Wind That Forms the Dunes. On reaching the Pacific fringe of the Pampa, or Desert, del Sacramento, after an ascent" from the coast of some 4,000 feet, one begins to feel the wind which is responsible for the formation

of the dunes. The general direction of this wind is from the northwest, being caused by radiation from the desert surface and the consequent inrush of cooler air from the Pacific. It blows at about 20 miles an hour on the hard, flat surface between the ridges. The wind starts as soon as the desert warms up and increases in violence with the rising temperature, attaining its maximum force between 2 p. m. and sunset. The conglomerate bed of this desert Pampa is chiefly formed of the following constituents, in order of their importance: Quartzite, tufa, gypsum, diorite (with iron and pyroxin crystals), and quartz. The whole is packed and blended by the gypsum which has run into and filled fractures made perpendicularly, thus facilitating weathering. The tufa is found in beds also in the neighborhood of Arequipa, and is cut into blocks for building purposes. They ring when struck like well-burnt bricks. The quartzite forms the main mass of the hills surrounding the desert. It weathers into a brick-red oxide on the surface, which gives the desert its tone, making the slaty-white sand dunes noticeable by contrast. The quartz r is Infrequent. Diorite is interspersed in the conglomerate, but in angular form, showing no signs of wa ; ter wearing; it must therefore be attributed? to volcanic ejecta. The genesis of the sand dunes is best seen on the Pacific or western fringe of the desert, where the winds are eating away the conglomerate ridges (possibly the remains of an ancient higher level), which run out from the quartzite hills in a direction at right angles to the prevailing winds. On the western border of the desert the sand remains largely inchoate, but after about 15 or 20 miles dunes begin to appear, and these Increase in nuiriber till oh nearing the Inland fringe, some 25 miles from Arequipa, they can be observed In serried battalions accompanying the railway. Once formed, the dunes, take their typical balf-moon shape and proceed

in stately sequence southeast across the Pampa until they reach some lai-ge obstacle or abrupt change of level. If the barrier is negotiable they adapt themselves to cross it, the dune projecting itself into the easiest passes and elongating up to the limit of its sand mass. Once the obstacle is crossed, the vanguard of the dune marks time until the rear catches up, forms once more into a half-moon shape, and proceeds on its way. These dunes often attain a considerable size, measuring up to 50 yards between the points of the horns.

The march of the dunes is assisted by the sand ripples, whose more exposed surfaces are blown onward by the wind. The sand climbs the steep back of the dune more slowly than the low salient wings, hence the halfmoon shape. Small particles travel at relatively high speed near ground level as far Has the projecting points, or horns, but as soon as they reach them they are on the lee of the wind and their farther progress checked until the mass of the dune catches up. Thus the distance the sand travels along the points is dependent on the maximum height of the back of the dune, and this in turn depends on the force of wind. The stronger the wind the higher it will force up the sand particles in a direct right angle to the axis of the dune, i. e., to a line drawn between the horns. The shape of any given dune is therefore the result of a perfectly graduated balance between the wind force and the floor level. The railway track in crossing the desert shows an average rise of slightly over 1 in 100, so that although their shape is governed by surface variations the dunes are on the whole marching uphill. Move 100 Yards a Year. Owing to my short stay in the Pampa I was not able to check the dunes’ rate of march by personal observation, but I was informed by plate layers and other railway men. whose duties necessitate watching them, that the rate is about 100 yards per annum. The high hills flanking the desert near

Sand Dune in Peruvian desert

Arequipa are too steep to allow the dunes to proceed farther. They therefore pile up in a sort of a sandy cemetery at the eastern edge of the Pampa. Before they reach the end, however, and as the hills deflect the air in different directions, dunes occasion- ■ ally advance over or threaten the railway line. The method of avoiding the threatened obstruction is simple but effective. A couple of men go out with long-handled spades and a wheelbarrow and collect loose pebbles and grit from the surface of the Pampa. This they proceed to scatter in a thin layer over the back of the unfortunate dune. The pebbles arrest the action of the ripples and so interfere with the even circulation of the sand'particles, which is apparently as essential to the progress of the dune as the circulation of blood to a human being. Very shortly the dune assumes a lopsided shape, sagging where the debris has been cast upon it, and offering, instead of a wellroupded back, a breach to the action of the wind. The progress of disintegration is fairly rapid, and at the end nothing is left on the Pampa except the original wheelbarrow loads of grit and pebbles which suffice to exercise the monster. The dunes advance over pebbles and stones without disturbing their position. I noticed immediately behind several large dunes scattered stones that obviously had not shifted from their bed, just as pebbles may lie secure on the seashore in the swell of the breakers. Generally speaking, the smoother the surface of the Pampa and the higher the wind, the larger and more perfect becomes the dune. fi- . -

“You wouldn’t think it, but I once had a happy home.” “Then why didn’t you do something to keep it happy?" \ ' “I did, mister—l left It.”

Conceit Is not a virtue, yet every man should have a little of it in his makeup.

Did His Share.

IN STRANGE CITY

Lot of One Transplanted From , Small Town is Hard. •• You Gfn\ Tell Whom You Want to jyw UfotH You Know, Which . Jhinfle Complicated. It gives you a queer feeling to be suddenly transplanted from the little home town to a crowded city street made up of houses, houses, houses, where you don’t know a soul, and never expect to, says a writer in the Indianapolis News. City folk don’t care who lives across the street or next door. They have thelr friends scattered about in various places where they can find them when they want them. But we small town folk just wonder and wonder who lives behind all those lovely front doors, and when we catch a glimpse of the inhabitants we’re interested in them and wonder where they came from and what names they all bear. If by chance we find, from the telephone directory, that the people just back of us wear the very same name we wear, we wonder if they might be some of our long lost kith and kin, and if we’d like ’em if we knew ’em! It’s always risky business hunting up kinfolk, so we’ll not try it; but really, the woman is so pretty, and the baby so cunning, and the young man who comes home in the machine at the end of the day is so proud of both of them, that we’d just like to say “Howdy—you’ve got the same name we have !** and take the consequences.

There’s the two-year-old baby three houses down the street, who waves her tiny hand and calls “By-by” when we pass. We’d like so to know her name, and answer the friendly little greeting. And there is the lonely boy across the street, who isn’t used to city ways yet. He sits on the front steps with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, the most dejected looking lump of boyhood that you could imagine. You want to cheer him up, and tell him things will be better when he gets acquainted, but how in the world is he to get acquainted? And the young woman who walks up and down the back yard of the house across the alley, carrying a tiny baby in her arms and looking anxiously down into its little face. If I was only a little grayer I’d risk assuming a grandmotherly air and ask her if the baby is sick. And there’s the old man who sits on the front porch of the handsome house nearer the car line. We can’t decide for certain whether he is sad or grouchy —feeling the bitterness of having to live off a son-in-law—or whether he is a hectoring old duffer, worrying the soul out of his daughter-in-law. Back home we’d know all about it. And the handsome woman who sometimes buys fruit on one side of the Italian’s cart while you’re buying on the other side—you’d like to know her, or you think you would. ,

That’s the trouble in the city. 'You can’t know for certain whom you want to know, until you know—which makes things complicated. Gradually you grow accustomed to the strange houses and strange faces, and form your own ideas. Gradually you get on speaking terms with the shy baby boy next door, so that when you go out on the back porch he doesn’t make a wild dive for his back porch, but stands up in his sand pile, waving his hands excitedly while he tells you some wonderful rlgamarole about his bucket and spoon, and you find him quite as lovable as any baby at home. The city throws the spell about you, and you find it mighty interesting and entertaining, and you grow to love the strange street because it seems home after the little trips away fKom it,- but for country folk used to country ways, give us the home-town, where every house beams on us like a familiar face as we pass—where we know the people behind the front doors, and love them, just because they are our home folk.

Misfits in College Classes.

In every large college there are students who ought not to be there. Usually they are sent by parents who think the social status of the family demands college graduates. Most parents who can afford it send their children to college. Many of them do not go through to the end, because they are Incapable of completing the work, and it could have been foreseen that theft would fall. Many persons overestimate the social and intellectual value of a college education. This notion leads parents to insist upon putting through a literary college boys and girls who ought to be training for usefulness in farm, store or shop. When one whom nature Intended to be out in the open using Ms muscles mainly, or at least doing practical work, Is put through a literary course, he is quite likely to be a misfit not only in college, but also out in the world thereafter. A college course is not an unmixed blessing for every one who is pushed through it.—Mother’s Magazine.

Listening.

The sergeant-major was addressing a squad of new arrivals, and noticed one who had Ms eyes on the ground and bls head held downwards in a listening attitude. “What were you in civil life?” he rapped out. “A gardener, str,” replied the recrplt. “Oh, I see,” said the sergeant major; “You’re listening for worms, uh F _ ________