Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 October 1901 — Rockefeller's Private Wire. [ARTICLE]

Rockefeller's Private Wire.

John D. Rockefeller occasionally uses the long-distance telephone when away from his New York office, but not for important business. For such purposes he never uses the malls. There is a private wire from the office to his mansion at Forest hill, Ohio, and the Standard Oil millionaire, when at the latter point, transacts business Jußt as though he were in New York. He never writes a message, but talks to a trusted and reliable operator. The sheep king of Australia is Samuel McCaughney, an Irishman, who went to Australia in 1856 with practically nothing. He did not succeed well at first, but started again with a small flock and from year to year has added to his holdings, until now he has more sheep than any other man in the world. He has more acres of land than sheep, and -his possessions are In the best parts of Australia. One of his farms, on the Darling downs, is thir-ty-six miles long and forty miles wide. Altogether he owns more than 1,000,000 acres, and leases about 1,000,000 more. Some of the English tenures are exceedingly curious. A farm near Broadhouse, in Yorkshire, pays annually to the landlord a snowball in midsummer and a red rose at Christmas. The manor of Foston is held by a rental of two arrows and a loaf of bread. An estate In the north of England is herd by the exhibition before a court every seven years of a certain vase owned by the family; another, in Suffolk, by an annual rental of two white doves. The western mosquitoes don’t appear to have heard of kerosene. They bite oil magnates as freely as anybody else.—Kansas City Journal.