Rensselaer Republican, Volume 25, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1893 — MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. [ARTICLE]

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES.

The only royal road there is, is the one that leads to ruin. The unexplored area of Canada is 1,000,000 square miles. At the summer hotel the paint is fresher than the milk and buster. Pencil writing may be set by breathing on it, or, better still, by passing the tongue over the writing. Deer are reported to be so plentiful in p Michigan town that they have to be stoned out of the turnip fields. There is as much differences between independence and churlishness as there is between almonds and aloes. Pour boiling water over raisins and let them stand a moment before seeding. It lessens the labor wonderfully. Lobster and salmon are so disliked by the Shah of Persia, that when either is served at a table where he is seated, he leaves the room. The Angora goat supplies the hair which adorns ordinary dolls. An English syndicate controls this product, and it is valued at $40,000,000 a year. Two tin cans, containing $1,900 in gold coin, were found concealed in the crotch of a tree, at San Bernardino, Cal., by a wood-chopper named Jones. ■ " The race-track at Columbus, Ga. which was laid out fifty years agD, is generally reputed to be the oldest continuously used race course in the country. A steam derrick that easily lifts an eighty-ton gun, and swings it around as readily as if it were a bale of hay, is on one of the docks at Hamburg. Henry Thomas, of Summitville, Col., boasts of finding two of the largest gold nuggets on record. One of them is worth S9OO and the other S3OO. The latest fad in autograph books is one of cooking recipes. Each formula written in the book has the signature of the contributing friend under it. When reappointed to U. S. Government positions, the widows of Union soldiers and sailors will not be compelled to undergo civil-service examination. Father J. J. Nouri, who recently described his alleged discovery of Noah’s Ark, was committed to an insane asylum in California the other day. The costliest pipe in the world is smoked, on great occasions, by the Shah of Persia. It is set with diamonds, rubies and emeralds, and is worth $400,000. A dog at New Haven, Conn., being the object, of much abuse, committed suicide a few days ago by jumping out of the third-story window of a factory. The special postoffice for use at the Chicago Fair gronnds will cost $40,000 for clerk hire, and an additional $23,000 has been appropriated for transportation of mails and incidental expenses. The Royal Humane Society has awarded its silver medal to Boatswain McDermott for an extraordinary feat of bravery. Two sailors of the warship Swallow were bathing from a boat in the Sea of Zanzibar, when a shark appeared. McDermott, who remained in the boat, was e’ever enough to leap from the boat square on the shark’s back just as therdatter came alongside for his prey. The fish was frightened off for time enough to pull all three men aboard the boat. Two muskrats came up the drain into the cellar of Mrs. Sarah Howards’s house at Houlton, Me., a week or two ago, and being unmolested, they soon became so tame they ventured into the kitchen. They tried to fraternize with the old cat, and ate out of her saucer. The cat never molests them, but the kittens occasionally cuff them and drive them away from the milk. They have made a nest under the cupboard in the kitchen, and now are tame enough to run around while the folks are about without any manifestation of fear, and will even sit up and sniff at a hand held toward them.

Kalispel, the new city oi Northern Montana, on the Great Northern Railroad, is not yet two years old, but its growth is marvelous. It is lighted by electricity, is just completing water-works which will furnish an unlimited supply of pure mountain water, and has a well-or-ganized city council and board es trade, and public buildings and residences that would be a credit to cities fifty yours old. It has in Flathead Valley Reservation the finest body of farming land in the State, while the mountains and hills are rich in mineral wealth. A great immigration is expected along this new line of the Great Northern in the early spring, when the road will be completed to the Pacific coast. Siemens’ armature wasinVehtcd and applied to practical use in the year 1834. A touching old rural custom still prevails in the western parts of France during the harvest season. On the edge of a field bordering the highway a sheaf of grain is left standing, to which all the' peasants of the village contribute, and which is called “the stranger's sheaf," as it is the property of the first trampor other homeless wayfarer who may care to earn* it away and profit by its price.