Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 August 1885 — Too Much Collar. [ARTICLE]

Too Much Collar.

What a nuisance a collar is, to be sure! If the button on your neck-band does not come offm the process of adjustment—and sometimes it does not—even then the trouble is not over. On the contrary, it is only just begun. If yog do not pin down the sides, ten to one your collar will be climbing atop of the neck-band and keeping you in a continual fret all day long; and if you undertake to pin the stiff linen in place, you have got a struggle before you. You push and push, and the more you push the more persistently does the pin refusfe to penetrate. You throw pin No. 1 down with a casual remark, aud take up pin No. 2. No. 2 deceives you into believing that it is an honest pin. The point enters the linen with a charming docility, but, when you would drive it home, it doubles up into a fish-hook, and, with more casual remarks, you fling it after No. 1. You catch with desperation a third pin, and, giving it a savage push, drive it half-way up to the head into your thumb-or finger. Not to mention the pain that throbs through your lacerated digit, the fact that your collar is besmeared with blood, and that it must come off and you must begin operations de novo, is enough to complete your transition from a mild and gentle good citizen into a heartless villain. Yes, the collar is a nuisance, with everything pertaining to it. Boslow 7'ranstript. - . ; ( _ The ordinary dwellings of the Japanese are not firmly attached by foundations to the earth but rest loosely on squared stones or bowlders buried in the ground, the result of which is to partially prevent the transmission of momentum from earthqpakes. An

Englishman has made an improvement on this plan and rests the house at each of its piers upon a handful of cast-iron shot. These shot, of the size of buckshot, so increase the frictional resistance to rolling that the house is practically astatic, and the motion is in most earthquakes only about one-tenth of what it is outside.