Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1879 — INTERESTING ITEMS [ARTICLE]

INTERESTING ITEMS

A Rome, Ga., man killed a,rattle snake ten feet long with thirty-five rattles. , A Belgian has been arrested who declares that he was chosen by lot to kill the King. The Brazilian coffee crop this year is 2,500,000 twigs, a shrinkage of 2,000,000 since last y < Nine men killed 224 alligators on a prairie, a half a mile long, in Polk county, Fla., in one day. The Calhoun Times tells of a bantam rooster that feigns dead and does many other tricks at command. It is reported that a new steamer is to be built for the White Star Lins with a guaranteed speed of twenty miles an hour. Wm. E. Baker, of Grover & Baker fame, has a $5,000,000 park at Weliesley, Mass., filled with absurdities of all kinds. ' A poor fisherman at Tallahassee, Fla., while digging worms for bait the other day, came upon an old brass kettle containing $1,400 in gold coin. During a business career of sixty years Peter Cooper never failed to settle wtih all his employes on pay-day, although he* often had 2,500 men in his service. '

Henry Hammond has confessed to burning an East St. Louis house for the insurance, in which a man, two women and three children were destroyed. A patent has been taken out in England on a process for removing injurious gasses from smoke, thus abolishing a great nuisance of large manufacturing towns. The Edgimoor Iron Company, of Philadelphia, secured the contract for furnishing 10,758,000 pounds of Bessemer steel, and 34,000 pounds of iron for the Brooklyn bridge. Not all the criminals in Texas escape punishment* A youth named Lowry has just been incarcerated in the Lavacca County Prison for altering the mark on a hog’s ear. The. House of Commons meets at 4 p. m. and often sits until 4 a. m., but the House of Lords meets at 5 p. m.< and adjourns promptly at 8 p. m., the dinner hour of the members. The marriage of a. loving couple in Germany is being deferred because the birde cannot prove that she was born, her existence seeming not to answer German legal requirements as to proof. The Prince of Wales apparently goes shopping more or less from time to time, if a London correspondent is correct (which he probably isn’t) in saying that he owes tradesmen JlO,000,000. j During the celebration of St. John’s festival in Ravenna, Italy, a'maniac ran into the crowded streets-with a butcher knife in his hand, and attacked everybody he met. Eleven persons were injured. Dr. Hitchcock insists that knowledge is a preventative of disease, showing that the insane in Massachusetts are nine-tenths uneducated paupers, and so are 59,000 of the 06,000 in asylums in England.

It is contrary to the laws in Cyprus to cut down trees. The son of an old priest, having cut one down, was summoned to answer. He being ill, the father went in bis place, and was condemned to seven days 7 imprisonment,

and to lose his hair, mustache and! beard. James Palmer went into an undertaker's shop at Riverton, Va., got measured for a coffin, which he-said was for a man exactly his size. “Have 'it ready this afternoon,” he said., “for the corpse will be ready by that time.” Then he went to a railroad track near by, lay down on it, and let a train run over him. Peter Igo, of Lawrehce, Mas®., wa very poor and proud. Being out of work and money, he did not make his plight known, but fed his wife and child on bread and water, and went wituout any food at all himself. A messenger who went to tell him of a chance for work, found him dead form starvation. A case of love at first sight is reported from Alaska. A sergeant of the Marine Corps is about to lead to the alter the daughter of the Indian chief, Sitka Jack. The bride having paddled alongside the Alaska with her little canoe loaded with fish, the gallant Sergeant was immediately smitten and fascinated. A bridegroom at Grinnell, lowa, received a cigar by mail, accompanied by the written assurance that it would be found to be of an uncommonly good flavor. The bride recognized the handwriting as that of a rejected suitor, and unrolled the cigar, to find several grains of strychnine in the end that a smoker would bite oft