Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1881 — TABLE TALK. [ARTICLE]

TABLE TALK.

A penny edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been published in London. The average English jailbird gets 260 ounces of food, the average pauper 166 ounces. Governor Roberts, of Texas, says he would rather walk than ride on a railroad pass. Lord Londonderry, a very large cpal, owner, now sells coal retail as well as whole.-ale. The pawnbrokers of Great Britain, 4,372 in number, take in during the year 200,000,000 of pledges. Sheep cheese is very popular in Austria, and an enterprising Austrian has has started a sheep dairy near Chattanooga with 1,000 head. Eighteen miles was the length of a boat race rowed by three crew's of Minnesota lumbermen. They were completely exhausted by the effort.Not only did Queen Victoria go to see a play at her sen’s Scotch home, but on a subsequent evening she was his partner in a dance at a ball there. The late Gov. Wiltz, of Louisiana, left /his widow and five children in poverty, and a committee of leading citizens has appealed to the neople of the State to provide a fund for them. Mr. Carl Bock, a naturalist now exploring Siam, discoveredjin Sumatra two years ago the smallest antelope in the world. The adult of this species was barely fifteen inches in length and nine in height. The well-to-do ladies of Melbourne have agitated the question of seats for shop girls so successfully that nearly all the establishments employing female assistants have provided these humane conveniences.

Although both the sons of the Prince of Wales are receiving a naval education, the eldest, Prince Alliert Victor, will ultimately be appointed to a commission in the army; the youngest, Prince George, being destined for a naval career. The Superintendent of the experiment! tea farm at Summervll e, 8. C\ sent 8,000 tea plants to the Atlanta Exposition, on 0ct.421. The average height of these specimens, which were selected as a fair sample of the crop, is about nineteen inches, and they look healthy and hardy. Ilfracombe, a lovely seaside place, seems to be the English Niagara. A gentleman who went there fi-r his honeymoon says that before h had been at the Royal Clarence H >tel t hree days he was asked to occupy the head of ’the table, as being the eldest married man present and he hadn’t been spliced a week! A widow applied to the Mayor of Allegheny for aid. She had not a morsel of food in her house, and was about to be ejected for non-payment of rent Her distress was not the result of poverty, sbe explained, for she was very wealthy; and she showed His Honor tba deed .of 10,000 acres of Kentucky

land, worth SIOO an cere, but now unproductive. According to a Milanese journal, the prefect of one of the first cities of Italy who is a rich landowner, has, in this civilized age, resorted to a feudal custom, obliging his field laborers to wear an iron muzzle during the grape harvest, io prevent them from tasting a few bunches of grapes. The fact was noticed last year, and yet the said prefect still represents the government. The superintendent of the Binghamton Juvenile Asylum is a firm believer that a propensity for crime is hereditary. He cites the case of a boy whose parents and grandparents were thieves but who had never known them nor their ways, and had been .reared most carefully. Kleptomania was developed in him, however, and he will steal things which cannot be of any value to him, simply from impulse. A writer on domestic life in Italy to day says that, as a rule, “distrust and suspicion rule the ordering of an Italian household. No master or mistress usually believes iu the integrity of any one in his or ber employ, and the whole home life resolves itself iuto a kind of war of wits —a g im game of cleverness of theft in itched by cleverness of detection ” The sei van ts are abominably treated—badly ted, abused,, and scolded. A remarkable stampede is in progress toward the Beni river in Bolivia, unexplored until last winter, when Dr. E. R. Health, ascended it, and discovered vast forests of and caouchouc. Fully 16,000 men have gone there, and the export of rubber alone has bCtn from 15 pounds to 75,000, with promises ol 6 000,000 next year. Dr. Health is sanguine of finding rich deposits of precious metals and medicinal plants along the Madre de Dios. ' '