Rensselaer Union, Volume 3, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 June 1871 — CURRENT ITEMS. [ARTICLE]

CURRENT ITEMS.

Divorces—The turn of the tied. A Life Preserver—The fire escape. The Land of Nod—An auction shop. Cheap Out-of-door Breakfast—A roll on the grass. Nothing so reasonable and cheap as good manners,. Now is the time to insure in the Mutual Life, of Chicago. An exchange says a horse sandwich is an ear of corn between two wisps of grass. ’ Captain Hall takes with him, in his Arctic voyage, a thermometer which will register 88 degrees below zero. Little fish have a proper idea of business. Not being able to do better they start on a small scale. A Maine man’s family of four sons and one daughter have married his next-door neighbor’s four daughters and one son. A widow holding a policy on her deceased husband, in the Washington, gets the money herself. It cannot be taken for his debts. The young ladies in New Haven are lerrning to play the violin. The idea of having four strings to their bow is fascinating. “Imperceptible switches” are announced for sale in New York. These, of course, are for young ladies; but what the small boys want to see announced are impalpable switches. The Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons, in session at Burlington, Vt., recently, unanimously voted to return to its allegiance to the general Grand Chapter of the United States, from which body it se - ceded in 1860. A Crawford Co., Pa., farmer, who raised a great crop of corn last year, says the main crop of roots were, by measurement, found to be from seven to nine inches below the surface, without hilling, while some of them extended to a depth of twenty-two inches. “ Johnny,” said one of the boys to a bereaved friend, who had just lost his father; “yer behaved well at the funeral.” “.Oh, pshaw!” replied Johnny,, with the air of one whose merits were only half recognized, “ you should have seen me at the grave.” At the session of the Photographers’ Convention, in Philadelphia, the President stated that Professor Morse was the first person who took a photographic picture on the American continent, and that the camera which he then used is still in existence. John G. Roberts lived in a Boston house forty-seven years, the tenant of one family, until quite recently when he was obliged to give way to the march of improvement and move. The family whose tenant he had been so long, presented him a silver service appropriately inscribed. “ Will you take this woman to be your wife?" “Well Squire,” was the reply, “ you must be a green uu to ax me such a question as that. Do you suppose I’d be such a plaguy fool as to give up the barhunt and take this gal to the quilting frolic if I warn’t conscripturously sarlin and determined to have her? Drive on with your business.”

There are 39 inmates of the Illinois State Penitentiary who are under 18 years of age—32 white and 7 colored. Six were sent for burglary and larceny; 15 for burglary ; 9 for larceny; 2 for assault with fh’ rent to kill; 2 for forgery} 3 for robbery. Hereafter all juvenile offenders will be sent to the State Reform school at Pontiac. Benjamin Franklin left, in 1791, to Boston and Philadelphia, each £I,OOO ($5,000) to lie loaned in small sums to mechanics. He calculated the fund would reach, in one hundred years, over $650,000, and gave directions as to its investment The Boston Trawler says the Boston fund amounts to $142,068.90, and is well invested, but the Philadelphia fund is less than $50,000. Long prayers famished the theme of a discussion at the Young Men’s Christian Convention in Washington. One of the delegates asked: “ What do you do with the people who presistently indulge in long prayers*” The answer promptly given by another was: “ Never give them a chance to pray I” instantly qualified by another, who said: "Except in private.” In reply to a young friend leaving a town because some things in it were not exactly to her taste or content, an old lady of experience said; “My dear, when you have found a place where everybody and everything are always pleasant, and nothing whatever is disagreeable, let me know, and I’ll lite there too." Mvsical criticisms nowadays run something after the following style in certain parts of the United Blates: Mine wore a rich purple suit trimmed with a handsome shade of lavender, a white

over-garment, tight-fitting, with flowing sleeves, and a white bonnet trimmed with the same shades of purple and lavenderrind she sang finely. Rev. Thomas Hanlon, of Pennington, N. J., a school teacher of the Squeers sort, recently whipped four pupils of his school so cruelly with a rawhide that they had to be helped home by their companions. His intention was to walk through eight of them, but when he came to the fifth his strength gave out. Their offense was bean-shooting. It is said that the improved lands in South Carolina are worth $20,000,000, while the fences that enclose them have actually cost $16,000,000. The fences in New York have cost $144,000,000; those of Ohio, $115,000,000; and, according to an estimate made by Nicholas Biddle, thirty years ago, the fences of Pennsylvania had then cost $100,000,000. The fences of the whole Union are estimated at $1,300,600,000. An Ohio Judge has decided that the words of a “common scold arc not actionable.” In a recent case where a woman, in referring to the guardian of her children, said “ he could not spend so much money without using the funds of the ward,” the Judge held that they were not slanderous, since thev had their origin in a propensity to find mult with anything and everything. At Boston, a lady who had been injured while returning on the street cars from a church meeting of spiritualists at Malden, brought suit against the railway company. The statutes of the State make all traveling on Sunday, for amusement, illegal, so that injuries received while so traveling would not afford ground of action for damages. The main legal point of the defense in this case was that a camp-meeting of Spiritualists was not a place of worship, but a place of amusement. The jury took a different view of the matter, and returned a verdict of $5,000 for the plaintiff. An Instrument has been invented that marks “the ebb of time,” showing how many minutes there are prior to any event. If placed in the post-office it reads, “Mails open in thirty minutesone minute later it reads “ in twenty-nine minutes,” then in tw’enty- eight, and so on. At a railway station it reads, “ this train leaves in ten minutes,” then in eight, etc, and when the index reaches 0, the train starts. Thus, ai/y passenger, on entering a station, knows just how much time he has for getting tickets, checks, a newspaper and a seat, without consulting a watch or a clock to ascertain the hour of the day. This story comes from Sharp Mountain, in Pennsylvania: “Twoyoung girls a few days ago left a smaller one, about four years old, alone under a tree for a short time, and on returning to the spot found the little one standing still and speechless —neither replying to their questions nor wishing to leave the spot They finally carried her home against her will, where every question was asked and effort made to make her speak, but in vain, until they inquired if she had seen a snake, when she immediately went into convulsions, with which she had been afflicted at intervals ever since. —The Wilmington (N. C.) Journal says: “A very skillful and successful medical operation—that of transfusion of blood from a lamb to a human body—was performed in this city on last Friday afternoon by Drs. D. F King and J. E. Winants. The subject was a colored man, an inmate of the City Hospital, who had been suffering for some time past, and who had lately seemed in danger of death from mere exhaustion. When laid upon the table he was too weak to talk, and appeared to have but a few hours of life left in him. When his vein was opened but one drop of blood fell from it. The carotid artery of the lamb was opened, and the blood was forced from thenqe, by the palpitation of the animal’s heart, through a small glass tube, into the patient’s cephalic vein. In this way about eight ounces of blood was conveyed from the iamb to the man. The operation was entirely satisfactory in its results, and the patient is now doing very well.” Nitro glycerine does not seem to become any more civilized as it mixes in scientific society. We read, in a German publication, an extraordinary account of - the explosion of only ten drops Of this substance, which a pupil in a laboratory had put iu a small cast iron saucepan, ana heated with a Bunsen gas flame. The effect of the explosion was that the fortysix panes of glass of the windows of the laboratory were smashed to atoms, the saucepan was hurled through a brick wall, the stout iron stand on which the vessel had been placed was partly split, partly spirally twisted, and the tube of the Bunsen burner was split and flattened outwards. fortunately, none of the three persons present in the laboratory at the time were hurt. When nitro-glycerine is caused to fall drop by drop on a thoroughly red hot iron plate, it burns off as gunpowder would do under the same conditions ; but if the iron be not red hot, but yet hot enough to cause the nitro-glycer-ine to boil suddenly, an explosion takes place.— Scientific American.