Rensselaer Republican, Volume 20, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1888 — SOME ODD THINGS. [ARTICLE]

SOME ODD THINGS.

A citizen of Canton, Miss., drives a pair of pet bears in a buggy. Bearing dogs for their skins is practiced ed in Manchuria and Mongolia just as sheep farming elsewhere. Grand Island, Neb., has a citizen 73 years old who is just now through with his attack of whooping cough. Santa Armado, a lad about 16 years old, on Wednesday a week ago caught a 154-pound tarpon with a hook and line out in the river opposite Fort Myers, Fla. - * -

One of the quaint characters ip Portland, Me., the other evening, was Benjamin Fuller, a Pittston farmer, who has read books two hours a day for forty years, and has a bigger library in his head than any man in Maine. At Brunswick, Ga„ a man named Tilton had an alligator that was being fed on ice cream. Mr. Tilton neglected to give his pet the usual amount of cream one day last wfeek, and the next morning the reptile was dead. Cretone of the cheap sort, used for decorating rooms, turns out to be as arsenically poisonous as green wallpaper. Out of forty-four samples recently examined in London none were free from arsenic. The greens and blues were the least harmful, while reds, browns, and blacks were heavily loaded with the poison. The skill with which dock rats board a vessel by running along her cables has long been a terror to ship-ownei s. A protector has just been invented in the shape of a big tin funnel through which the cable runs. The big end Of the funnel faces the shore, and the rats cannot surmount it. A few days ago a notice was sent from the interior department’ calling upon a party in Bronson, Fla., to pay 3 cents for an excess of two-hundredths of an acre of land included in his homestead entry. As the notice was sent by registered mail, costing 12 cents, Uncle Ham is out on this collection, The dugong, a species of whale taken in large numbers at Queensland, has probably furnished the slender basis of fact upon which the mermaid and merman stories are founded. It is about eight to twenty feet in length, lives upon submarine beds of seaweed, breathes by means of lungs, has a humanlike head, with hair resembling a man’s beard. The flesh of the animal is eaten, and is said to have the flavor of beef, veal, or bacon, according to the part of the body from which the meat is taken. Its oil has all the medicinal qualities of cod liver oil without the disagreeable taste and smell of the latter.