Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1875 — A Nice Man to Ride With. [ARTICLE]

A Nice Man to Ride With.

The London correspondent of the Graphic tells this story: “ One of the most popular notions in England is that our system of railway traveling surpasses yours in comfort from the fact that with our small carriages it is easy to get a compartment to oneself, or, at worst, a carriage with only one or two occupants. There are drawbacks, however, even to this summit of earthly felicity, as the adventures of a worthy director who recently traveled from one Midland station to another may show. The train he had to catch was very full and he was rather late, and in hurrying to and fro he observed a carriage tenanted by two men, one of whom was leaning out of the window while No. 2 was asleep in the corner. No. 1 endeavored to assert that the carriage was taken, but the director would stand no such nonsense and hustled into the carriage, fallowed by the solicitor to the. company. The train started immediately, knd tenant No. 1 proceeded to explain that his sleepy triend was a lunatic, and that he was his keeper, and that as his patient was excitable all that was to be hoped was that he might not wake. Unluckily this hope proved vain, and th invalid, being aroused, required the di* rector to sit opposite to him while he explained the theory of the connection between fish-ponds and frogs, thh director’s open mouth doing duty for the former and the ranunculi being represented by little pellets of paper, which were hurled down the aperture with great precision by the lunatic. This interesting invalid next insisted on the director’s daubing his face with ink which was produced from a traveling-bag, and the entertainment wound up with a screaming farce called 4 Hot Pancakes,’ in which the fun consisted in the insane gentleman’s slapping each of his companion’s faces in turn, and exclaiming: ‘There’s another hot pancake.’ This finally resulted in a free fight, and the capture of the lunatic; but the director takes care now whom he travels with.”

The Chinese have names which correspond in frequency with the Browns and Smiths of Anglo-Saxon Christendom. Those most frequently occurring are Ching, Chang, Wang and Shih, which are the equivalents of “gold,” “long,” “prince" and “stone.”