Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1893 — Page 6

THE REPUBLICAN. Gborb E. Marshall, Editor. RENSSELAER - INDIANA

It is said that ex-President Harrison will feuild a handsome residence at Elkins, W Va., which he will use for a summer home. Stephen B. Elkins and other notable politicians have already built palatial homes at the little town, and it is supposed that Mr. Harrison’s temporary change of base is due to the influence of the ex-Secretary of War. > : ■» * The Chicago Record editorially states that the labor situation in that city is very much improved. Many factories that shut down two months cago have resumed operations. Others promise to follow soon. Building operations are beginning to go forward, the reduction in prices in many lines of necessary expense incident to the construction of houses making the opportunity especially favorable to those having money to invest in that way.

An electric train safe for the protection of railway express messengers, and annihilation of train robbers, has been perfected. The structure is large and roomy, and is lined with rubber and provided with a perforated bottom for purposes of ventilation. The outfit is connected with a dynamo, and when a messenger is in danger he is to step inside and —locking the doors — turn on the current and the robbers do the rest—and are “forever at rest.” “The man from Ohio” has a great and unconquerable desire to head the procession in any undertaking in which he may embark. As an office-seeker he has in the past been übiquitous and phenomenally successful. His latest exhibition of enterprise came to light on “Ohio Day” at the World’s Fair. In the determination to go on record as having excelled the attendance on “Pennsylvania Day” many patriotic “Buckeyes” are said to have dropped four instead of one ticket into the box for each admission.

Disciples of Isaak Walton will be interested in the information that six thousand salmon were taken in nets from the wharves at Port Angeles, Wash., by amateur and unprofessional fishermen-recently. The run of salmon in the streams entering the lower part of Puget Sound has been unprecedented. The streams at times have been positively choked with the fish, and in some cases the residents, along the banks have resorted to the use of dynamite and giant powder until the rapids became filled with dead salmon. The attention of the State Fish Commissioner was called to the outrage and it was promptly stopped. Ruth and Esther are the dears, or at least it so appears, who will furnish lots of news interspersed with statesmens’ views on tljife questions of the day. All will hope and some will pray, that the. darlings will ’ keep well so that reporters can not sell us with their gauzy fairy tales of their infant woes and wails. Let. ’em cry and let ’em laugh—spare, O spare us useless “chaff.” It’s all right to tell how Grover brings procrastinators over, prods Dan Voorhees in his zeal for the cause of quick repeal, and we’ll pardon them for telling a big yarn about the swelling on th,c Presidential jaw,but the line we’ll surely draw at the measles and infantum —but of this,o “desperandum ”

A movement that might well be imitat?d in all the remaining wilds of the United States has been carried to the point of practical success in Alaska, being an attempt to stock the country with reindeer. Of 170 of the animals brought from Siberia but eleven died while eighty-eight fawns were born Of which seveqtynine were living a few’ weeks ago. The purpose of the movement is to furnish a reliable supply of food for the natives and also provide animals for work purposes. While it may not be practical or advisable to introduce the reindeer into the remaining territory of the United States that is likely to remain uncultivated, there is no doubt that other wild animals could be successfully and profitably propagated if protected by game laws rigidly enforced. j The spirit of the Puritans still exists among men. Many reformers lack only the power and the opportunity to enact and enforce statutes that would equal the “blue laws” of the wooden nutmeg State in severity. Newberg, Ore., promises to rival Salem, Mass., in the days when people were hung for witchcraft.

The city council of this “greatest moral city on earth” has recently passed an ordinance forbidding any person under the age of 18 to wander about the town after 7p. m. between November and April, and after 8 p. m. during the rest of the year, unless they are provided with a written permit from parents oF guardians, or 'are accompanied b' them, the penalty provided being a fine of not less than $5 nor more than S2O. or imprisonment for not less than two nor more than twenty days. Some people will regard this as making progress back wards, but its rigid enforcement in all our towns and cities would have a tendency to better the morals and growing characters of the rising generation.

Law is a queer science. Technicalities frequently defeat justice. Criminals known to be guilty often escape through the messes of the net woven about them by the prosecution. A peculiar case illustrating this unsatisfactory condition occurred at Indianapolis last week. Contractor Rains was engaged in putting down a cement walk on the property of a Mr. Stumps. His men became involved in a quarrel with two expressmen passing by. Bricks and stones were thrown, and it was charged that the missiles hurled by the expressmen struck the fresh cement walk, doing considerable damage. The two men were arrested and charged with “destroying the property of Mr. Stumps.” At the trial their counsel held that the sidewalk had not been accepted by Stumps, and was therefore still the property of Contractor Rains. The court held the point well taken and, although there was no doubt of the guilt of the men, they were discharged because they were “not guilty as charged.”

Fees of London Surgeons.

Some testimony concerning surgeons’ fees in England was given in a suit which was tried in the London High Court a few days ago. Charles Keetley, the senior surgeon of the West London Hospital, sued Prof. Banister Fletcher for $2,000 for attendance upon the latter’s son, who was badly hurt in the terrible railroad disaster at Burgos some time ago. Prof. Fletcher paid SSOO into court, declaring that to be an adequate payment for the services rendered. Dr. Keetley is reported by the New York Evening Post as testifying in his own behalf that he thought $l5O a day was fair remuneration for his undivided attention and that he would charge no less for a day’s work in London. He received $75 a day whenever he attended court for an insurance company with which he T-as connected professionally. Alfred Cooper, F. R. C. S., consulting surgeon of the West London Hospital. said that in his opinion Dr. Keetley’s charges were moderate in the extreme. For himself he should charge $2,000 for a trip to Paris and $l5O to S2OO a day while he remained there. For going to Burgos he should charge $5,000. For bringing a patient home from Burgos and taking care of him doing a three days’ journey, he should charge $2,500. For devoting his whole time to a patient in London he should not consider S4O an hour excessive charge. Other surgeons gave similar testimony, and finally the jury decided that Mr. Keetley was entitled to $1,750, a verdict that gave him a substantial victor v.

A Dutiful Son.

A religious parliament was held near this city, in Warren county, a few days ago, says the Attica Ledger, that differed from the one in session at Chicago only in its vigorous termination. There was plenty of warmth in the discussion from start to finish, but when one man remarked that “anybody who belongs to church is an idiot,” the thermometer rose ten notches. “Do you mean that?” inquired the upholder of orthodoxy. “You betcher life I do,” warmly responded Bob Ingersoll’s pupil. “Well, you pull your coat off and get right out here in the road and we’ll settle it,” was the pressing invitation of the defender of theology. It was quickly accepted, and biff—bang —went the blows. It took exactly two short rounds to vindicate religion and place the “idiot” portion of the membership right before the world. While the form of the disciple of Tom Paine lay prostrate in the dust?a neighbor happened along and inquired the cause of the trouble, and this was the reply that came from the brave defender of the church: “Well, you see, he denounced religion, and further’n that he said right out that anybody that belonged to church was an idiot, an* I wouldn’t stand that talk because because —my mother belongs to church and I don’t 'low nobody to call her an idiot!"

A Misunderstanding.

Texas Siftings. A hard citizen who had been sent to the. Island'a number of-times was up again before Judge Duffy one day last week. After ii'-.posing another sentence the*little Judge said: “This will be, I hope, the last time I’ll have to punish you. ’’ “What! Is your Honor going to resign?”

MERMAID'S DOMAIN.

The Mighty Deep and Its Klorxl Wonders. rJWH’f'TWphmUion* in the Rihmrxlw Gardao* and ills Impraaaiona—pr, Talmtga'a Serinna; in his sermon Sunday fomoon in the Brooklyn tabernacle, as in many other discourses, Rev. T. De Witt Talmage took his hearers and readers through an untried region of thought and found a subject for most practical gospelization in “The Gardens of the Sea. ” The text selected was Jonah ii, 5, “The weeds were wrapped about my head,” “The Botany of the Bible, or, God Among the Flowers,” is a fascinating subject. I hold in my hand a book which I brought from Palestine, bound in olive wood, and within it are pressed flowers, which have not only retained their color, but their aroma. Flowers from Bethlehem, flowers from Mount of Olives, flowers from Bethany, flowers from Siloam, flowers from the valley of Jehoshaphat, red anemones and wild mignonette, buttercups, daisies, cyclamens. camomile, bluebells, ferns, mosses, grasses and a wealth of flora that keeps me fascinated by the hour, and every time I open it it is a new revelation. It is the New Testament of the fields. But my text leads us into another realm of the botanical kingdom. Although I purposely take, this morning, for consideration the least observed and least appreciated of all the botanical products of the world, we shall find the contemplation very absorbing. In all our theological seminaries where we make ministers there ought to be professors to give lessons in natural history. Physical scidhce ought to be taught side by side with revelation. It is the same God who inspires the page of the natural world as the page of the scriptural world.

That was an awful plunge thqt the recreant prophet Johah made when, dropped over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, he sank many fathoms down into a tempestuous sea. Both before and after the monster of the deep swallowed him he was entangled in the seaweed. The jungles of the deep threw their cordage of vegetation around him. Some of this seaweed was anchored in the bottom of the watery abysm, and some of it was afloat and swallowed by the great sea monster, so that while the prophet was at the bottom of the deep after he was horribly imprisoned he could exclaim and did exclaim in the words of my text: “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” Jonah was the first to record that there are growths upon the bottom of the sea as well as upon the land. The first picture I ever owned was a handful of seaweeds pressed on a page, and I called them “The Shorn Locks of Neptune.” These products of the deep, whether brown, or yellow, or green, or purple, or red. or intershot of many colors, are most fascinating. They are distributed all over the depths and from Arctic to Antarctic. That God thinks well of them I conclude from the fact that He has made 6,000 species of them. Sometimes these water plants are 400 or 700 feet long, and they cable the sea. One specimen has a growth of 1,500 feet.

On the northwest shore of our country is a seaweed with leaves 30 or 40 feet long, amid which the sea otter makes his home, resting himself on the buoyancy of the leaf and stem. The thickest jungles of the tropics are not more full of vegetation than the depths of the sea. There are forests there, and vast prairies all abloom, and God walks there as He walked in the garden of Eden “in the cool of the day.” Oh, what entrancement, this subaqueous world! Oh, the God given wonder of the seaweed! Its birthplace is a palace of cystal! The cradle that rocks it is the storm. Its grave is a a sarcophagus of beryl and sapphire. There is no night down there.

Hear it, mothers and fathers of sailor boys whose ship went down in our last August hurricane! There are no Greenwoods or Laurel Hills or Mt. Auburns so beautiful on the land as there are banked and terraced and scooped and hung in the depths of the sea. The bodies of our foundered and sunken friends are girdled and canopied and housed with such glories as attend no other Necropolis. When Sevastopol was besieged in the Anglo-French war, Prince Mentchikof, commanding the Russian navy, saw that the onlv way to keep the English out of the harbor was to sink all of the Russian ships of war in the roadstead, and so 100 vessels sank. When, after the war was over, our American engineer, Gowan, descended to the depths in a diving bell, it was an impressive spectacle. One hundred buried ships! But it is that way nearly all across the Atlantic ocean. Ships sunk not by command of admirals, but by the command of cyclones. But they all had sublime burial, and the surroundings amid which they sleep the last sleep are more imposing than the Taj Mahal, the mausolem with walls incrusted with precious stones and built by the great mogul of India over his empress. Your departed ones were buried in the gardens of the sea, fenced off by hedges ofcoralline. The prophet not only made a mistake bv trying to go to Tax-shish when God told him to g > to Nineveh, but he made a mistake when he

styled as weeds these growths that enwrapped him on the day he sank. A weed is something that is useless. It is something you throw out from the garden. It is something that chokes the wheat, it is something to be grubbed out from among the cotton. It is something unsightly to the eye. It is an invader of the vegLetable or flora! world. But this growth which sprang up from the depth of the Mediterranean or floaty cd on its surface was among the most beautiful things that God ever makes. It was a water plant known as the red colored alga, and no weed at all. It comes from the loom of infiuit& beauty. It is planted by heavenly love. It is the star of a sunken firmaament. It is a lamp which the Lord kindled. It is a cord by which to bind whole sheaves of practical suggestion. It is a poem all whose cantos are rung by divine goodness. Yet we all make the mistake that Jonah made in regard to it and call it a weed. “The weeds were wrapped about my head.” Ah! that is the trouble on the land as on the sea. We call those weeds that flowers. Yet Jonah did not more completely misrepresent the red alga about his head in the Mediterannean than most people misjudge the poor and forlorn and dying children of the street. They are not weeds. They are immortal flowers— down in the deep sea of woe, but flowers. When society and the church of God come to appreciate their eternal value, there will be more C. L. Braces and more Van Meters and more angels of mercy spending their fortunes and their lives in the rescue. Hear it, O ye philanthropists and Christians and merciful souls —not weeds, but flowqrs. I adjure you as the friends of all newsboys’ lodginghouses, of all industrial schools, of all homes for friendless girls and for the many reformatories and humane associations now on foot. How much they have already accomplished! Out of what wretchedness; into what good homes! Of 21,000 of these picked up out of the streets and sent into country homes, only twelve children turned out badly. In the last thirty years a number that no man can estimate of the vagrants have been lifted into respectability and usefulness and a Christian life. Many of them have homes of their own—though ragged boys once and street girls, now at the head of prosperous families, honored on earth and to be glorious in heaven. Some of them have been Governors of States. Some of them are ministers of the gospel. In all departments of life those who were thought to be weeds have turned out to be flowers. One of those rescued lads from the streets of our city wrote to another saying: “I have heard you are studying for the ministry. So am I.” As I examine this red alga which was about the recreant prophet down in the Mediterranean depths when in the words of my text he cried out, “The weeds were wrapped about my head,” and I am led thereby to furtherexamine this submarine world, 1 am compelled to exclaim, what a wonderful God we have! lam glad that by diving bell, and “Brooks’ deep sea sounding apparatus,” and ever improving machinery we are permitted to walk the floor of the ocean and report the wonders wrought by the great God. These so-called seaweeds are the pasture fields and the forage of the innumerable animals of the deep. Not one specie of them can be spared from the economy of nature. Valleys and mountains and plants miles underneath the waves are all covered with flora and fauna. Sunken Alps and Apennines and Himalayas of Atlantic and Pacific oceans. A continent that once connected Europe and America, so that in the ages past men came on foot across from where England is to where we now stand, all sunken, and now covered with the growths of the sea, as it once was covered with the growths of the land England and Ireland once all one piece of land, but now much of it so far sunken as to make a channel, and Ireland has become an island. The islands for the most part are only the foreheads of sunken continents. The sea conquering the land all along the coasts and crumbling the hemispheres, wider and wider become the subaqueous dominions. Thank God that skilled hydropraphers have made us maps and charts of the rivers and lakes and seas and shown us somethimg of the work of the eternal God in the water world. i There is a great comfort that rolls ; over upon us from this study of the i so-called seaweed, and that is the demonstrated doctrine of a particular Providence. When I find that the Lord provides -in the so-called seaweed the pasturage for the thronged marine world, so that not a fin or scale in all that oceanic aquarium suffers need, I conclude He will feed us, and if he suits the algae to the animal life of the deep He will provide the food for our physical and spiritual needs. And if He clothes tne flowers of the deep with richness of robe that looks bright as fallen rainbows by day and at night makes the underworld look as though the sea were on fire, surely He will clothe you, “O ye of little faith!” And what fills me with unspeakable delight is that this God of depths and heights, of ocean and of continent, may through Jesus Christ, the divinely appointed means, be yours and mine, to help, to cheer, to pardon, to save, to nnparadise. What matters who in earth or hell is against us if He is for us? Omnipotence to defend us, and omnipres-

ence to companion us and infinite love to enfold and uplift and enrapture us. My joy is that after we are quit of all earthly hindrances we may come back to this world and explore what we cannot now fully investigate. If we shall have power to soar into the atmospheric without fatigue I think we shall have power to dive into, the aqueous without peril, and that the pictured and tessellated sea floor will be as accessible as now is to the traveler the floor of the Alhambra, and all the gardens of the deep will then swing open to us their gates as now to the tourist Chatsworth opens on public days its cascades and statuary and conservatories for our entrance. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.” You cannot make me believe that God hath spread out all that garniture of the deep merely for the polyps and Crustacea to look at. And if the unintelligent creatures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic oceans He surrounds with such beautiful grasses of the deep, what a heaven we may expect for our -uplifted and ransomed "souls when we are unchained of the flesh and rise to realms beatific. Of the flora of that “sea of glass mingled with fire” I have no power to speak, but I shall always be glad that when the prophet of the text, flung over the gunwales of the Mediterranean ship, descended into the boiling sea, that which he supposed to be weeds wrapped about his head were not weeds, but flowers. And now I make the marine doxology of David my peroration, for it was written about forty or fifty miles from the place where the scene of the text was enacted. “The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands formed the dry land. Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, for He is our God. and we are the people of His pasture.” Amen.

One of Arizona’s Wonders.

San Francisco Call. For many years Heidelburg Universit j has had the honor of owning the largest barrel, or “tun,” us they call it, in the world. They have had the honor, although it does not really belong to them, for Arizona has a barrel that makes theirs fade into insignificance. The one at Heidelburg will not hold liquid, neither will the one in Arizona. In this they are the same, but they are different in many other ways. Arizona’s barrel is the work of nature and it is on the high peak of a mountain, about five miles from Aguas Calientas, which is in the California mountains about sixteen miles from a railroad. The barrel is one of those peculiar rock formations and is about 200 feet high, and the top of it is at least 2,000 feet above the valley. It can be seen for miles before the traveler gets to it, and its appearance is most deceiving. It requires no effort of the imagination to see the large utensil of Bacchus perched on its peak with a glass under a faucet, as if ready to be filled. A large fissure in a certain spot forms a bung-hole. It does not look like a barrel, unless seen from the plain; pn all other sides it is simply a rugged rock. It is a soft granite formation of volcanic orgin, and it is crumbling to pieces all the time. is so soft that half a dozen men with picks could knock it to pieces in a few days.

A Money Maker.

New York Weekly. Eastern Man— Making any money in Boom City? Western Man—N-o! been losing like sixty; but I have hopes, great hopes. Expect to be rolling in wealth next year. “Some new enterprise, I suppose?” “N-o not exactly. I expec tto be elected sheriff.

Spent Only One.

Good News. Little Dot—Mamma gave me two quarters to buy candy, but I only spent one. Father That’s something like. Now I’ll give you another quarter to put with the other. Little Dot—Thank yon, but I can’t put it with the other till I find it. It dropped out of my pocket on the -way to the candy store.

He Deserves Thanks.

New York Weekly. Jimson —I see that ladies are beginning to take their hats off at the theaters. Bilson—Yes, some bright genius started the theory that women kept their hats on because their hair was frowzy.

Not a Meteor.

Good News. Little Dot—l saw a meteor last night, and I wished some one would give me a box of candy, but it didn’t come true. Little Dick--That’s queer. Mebby it was only a lightning-bug.

Not Very Motherly.

Good News «• Little Johnny —I guess Tommy Dodd's mother is his steninothdr. Mamma—ls she? Little Johnny—She mus' be, ’cause whenever she says she’ll toll his father on him, she always docs.’’

Let Them Ride.

Good News. The—Do you think there is any reason why a young lady should not ride a bicycle as well as drive a horse? . He—Not at all. It is just as easy to dodge a bicycle os a carriage.

USEFULNESS OF NATURE.

When a Man Can Handle Her She "Will Work for Him. Indianapolis Journal. The man with’ the ginger beard was watching his neighbor labor“They didnt dig ’em that way out in Colorado where I lived,” said he. The neighbor, who was a hired man, dropped his patent digger, looked around to see if his employer was visible, found he was not. and took a seat on the ground ready to listen. “How did! you work it?” he asked. “By steam ?” “Steam!” said the man with the ginger beard. “Naw. Done it by lightning. ” “Lightning?” “Yas. You see, in the part of the State I was in they is no metals of any kind in the ground and no trees. I’ve often watched the lightning cavortin’around in the heavens fer a hour at a time, jist achin’ fer somethin’ to strike at, but not hein’ able to do so, ’cause they was nothin’ it could take a start at —no attraction, you see. Well, one day I was sweatin' away, just like you would be if the boss was around now, when a old feller that lived there before I come, come along and says he’d show me a scheme to save all that work. You can bet I was willin’, so he sends me to the house fer a bag o’ tenpenny nails, and he plants a nail in every place I had marked fer a hole. ‘They is a storm coinin’, says he ‘and if I ain’t mistaken she, is a-goin’ to do the job in one whirl.’ I didn’t say nothin’, fer, honest, I thought he wuz crazy, an’ I 'lowed I’d better humor him;

“After he got the nails all planted he dragged me away to a safe distance an’ told me to watch her work. Pretty soon the storm com§ along, with more thunder an’ lightnin’ in it than you will see here in a month o’ Sundays Djreckly it got over them nails. Then —biff! —blam! It went to pluggin’ away at them there nails stuck in the ground, the most delighted lightnin’ you ever see to git somethin’ to shoot at. An ev’ry time she hit there was the neatest post-hole dug out you ever see. I did has to trim a few of ’em up with a spade, but as a general thing, they was as neat as a body would want to look at.. Natur’is mighty useful if you know how to handle her.” The hired man- said “Gosh!” and resumed work in the automatic manner of one in a dream.

Potato Culture.

Hartford Courant. Professor Plum's experiments in potato culture, as related in Garden and Forest, go to show that large tubers throw out more shoots and produce a much larger crop than small ones. Instead of cutting to one, two or three eye pieces, the professor recommends cutting to two or three ounce pieces. Regarding soils his experiments, extending over many years, show great difference in the product in a moist or dry soil, or in one thoroughly pulverized, or in a dry or moist season, in affecting the condition of the planted tubers. In a very dry soil, small planted tubers lose theirffowcr more or less in producing shoots; while in a finely pulverized, moist soil, the growth is strong and the product greater. When the potatoes are planted whole their impervious coating prevents this drying, and there is a smaller loss in a dry soil. For this reason it is often better to plant the potatoes whole when the planting is done late in spring or early in summer. In a moist and well prepared soil there is much less difference between the effect of large and small pieces. Referring to the Professor’s experience, the Country Gentleman says that some years ago it performed a series of experiments to determine the effect of using large or small tubers for seed. The large ones weighed half a pound, the small ones about half an ounce. Each was cut alike in two or three pieces containing the same number of eyes. A fine, rich, rather strong soil was selected, made sufficiently line'to retain its moisture. They were planted early in the season and a uniform and proper moisture continued during the summer. When the resulting crop was dug each kind was kept carefully separate. .The potatoes from the small seed were quite as large as those from the large ones, and spectators pronounced the crops of equal size. But on measuring them it was found that the larger tubers gave one-tenth more in product. Had the soil been dry, or lumpy, or cloddy, or had a severe drought prevailed, or had they been planted late, it is probable that the small seed would not have given onehalf the others.

Railroad Rumble.

Texa» Siftings. “What time," asked a lady with an armful of bundles, “does the next train leave?" “It leaves on schedule time,” responded the affable and accommo? dating ticket agent. And the. lady repaired to the waiting room with the remark that she didn't know it left so late. At Le Mars, lowa, there is a novel penalty for intoxication. Any man who is twice arrested for drunkenness must submit to a course of treatment at a gold cure institute, or work on the streets ten days with a ball ana chaiA. Mrs- Amanda C. Kibble, who has been in the almshouse at Norfolk, Va., for the past few years, has,been awarded real estate valued at 170,000.