Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 November 1893 — Willie and Gertrude. [ARTICLE]

Willie and Gertrude.

Washington Star. _ It was night. The weather was bitter cold. “Oh, Willie!” said little Gertrude, “what shall we do? We are so poor that we have, no fuel with which to cook a porter house steak for our dear mamma.” “And it* is no use for us to try to borrow from the neighbors.” “No. There is nothing left to borrow.” “Where is the cat?” asked little Gertrude. “Here,” replied Willie, “Put her on the woodshed and twist her tail.” Willie did so. In a short time the windows of the neighborhood opened and bootjacks showered down. Gertrude gathered them up and said: “There, Willie, put the kittie carefully away; we may need her again when these boot jacks are burned." Was not Gertrude a wise little girl to profit so well by what she read in the comic papers?

Robert Louis Stevenson is in quarantine at Honolulu nursing his sick Samoan servant, Talola. He sailed on the steamer Mariposa from Apia to Honolulu for a short visit but after his arrival in port the servant was stricken with a malignant attack of measles. On the voyage Stevenson twice coutributed his services to entertainments given by the passengers, telling a weird tale of the sea and reading his graphic description of the great hurricane of 1889 at Samoa. The fortune of Mrs. W. H. Vanderbilt is estimated at 130500,000.