Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1874 — CURRENT ITEMS. [ARTICLE]

CURRENT ITEMS.

To please a woman let her do as she pleases. Diamonds are cheaper now than ever before. A small gold hand holding a pearl is new in ear-rings. Expensive marriage ceremonies , are pronounced snobbish. What three letters denote strength and activity?” N. R. G. (energy.) Necessity knows no law, but law knows a good deal of necessity. THE spanking period is appropriately called the palmy days of childhood. An anti-cremation philosopher living near Lake Erie thinks the dead should be drowned. Leisure is sweet to those who have earned it, but burdensome to those who get it for nothing. Advertisements printed in Chjnese characters are beginning to appear in the California papers. Mafle-sugar is so plenty m Vermont this season that the girls are 20 per cent, sweeter than usual. A lady lecturer believes that women ought to retain their own names when they get married. Bhe has retained hers thus far. Invisible purple gloves are worn by ladies in mourning in preference to the dead black gloves that are so apt to crack. Quiz believes in cremation, for the benefit of the soap trade. He knows lots of people whose ashes would make splendid lye. The business of swallowing needles, long monopolized by human beings, recently commended itself to a Vermont heifer, which ate a glove needle and died. The last smart old man lives in Augusta County, Va. He is ninety-one years of age, and made his own coffin the other day. The adventurous fellow who attempted to steal a red-hot stove must take a back seat, since William A. Meyers, of Pleasantville, Pa., is on trial for stealing nitroglycerine. Mr. Jno. 8. Jones, of Stafford, N. H., says that the fire in his house has not gone out for forty-five years. Mr. Jones uses an open fire-place and covers the fire at night. It is an old saying that every pound of sugar made from the maple in the spring robs the farmer of a bushel of wheat. That is, good sugar-making weather is bad for the wheat crop. Love your neighbor as yourself—borrow his plow, hoe, or horses whenever you can; but if he wants to borrow yours, tell him that you are very sorry, but you were just going to use it yourself. The newest ear-rings in Paris are of bone. They are cut in the form of manypointed stars tipped with different colors. A small star fastens in the lobe of the ear, and a larger one hangs underneath. They are very odd and very pretty. And now it is Mrs. Betsey Hobbs, of Clinton, Me., eighty-two years old, who, “ during the past eighteen months, with the assistance of her daughter, has made between 900 and 1,000 pairs pf pants, besides doing the work necessarily falling u£on a farmer’s wife.” There is an elm eighty-four years old and about six feet in diameter at Franklin, N. H., and the man near whose house it stands says that when he was a boy he pulled it up, which made his father so mad that he walloped him with it and then set it out again. The public have got so accustomed to hearing these disagreeable weather stories that they won’t mind somebody’s recalling that sixteen inches of snow fell at Middlebury, N. H., May 15,1834, and it snowed all day at Brandon on the 11th of June, 1842, the whole fall being five or six inches. A Connecticut teacher, who has seen the thing tried, says that the best plan for promoting good order, tidiness and ease in conversation among the pupils in a school is to place one of each sex at the same desk, allowing them to assist each other at their lessons and to select new Sartners at the end of each month if they esire it A man recently visiting one of the cemeteries in Portland, Me., overheard a thrice-made widow, not yet old or homely, who was standing beside three mounds, remark to a gentleman, who was known' to have been attentive to the widow in her youth: “ Joe, you might have been in that row had you possessed a little more Courage.” A blustering stranger dropped in at a Broughton street store yesterday, and, after asking for a number of articles not in the stock, finally inquired of the proprietor if he had a goose-yoke. The merchant returned a negative reply, but informed the stranger if he would wait long enough to have his neck measured he would accommodate him. The stranger simmered.— Savannah Nm. The sphygmiograph is the hard name of a new medico-scientific instrument. Its presence is to mark and register the pulsations of the wrist It is a very delicate and intricate piece of mechanism, propelled by clock-work, and by the tracking of a pencil on a piece of paper the force of the heart-beats is recorded. It is chiefly useful in showing the effect of different medicines on the nervous system. The meanest man in Newport, R. 1., so far as heard from, is a landlord who tried to drown out one of his tenants who was sick with consumption. The tenant fell four months in arrears, but his friends made up the money, whereupon the landlord demanded an increase of the rent, and, on their refusal to pay, went into the story above the sick man and dbluged the floor with water, which ran down into the sick man’s room. Mbs. William Dinsmore, of Sutton, Vt, has spent several years’ labor on a quilt, which now contains 2,834 pieces, each of which differs in color and figure from every other, and some of which show the various fashions from Queen Elizabeth’s time down to the present day. Nearly every State in the Union and some of the Territories, the British Provinces, Mexico and most of the South American States are represented in the quilt, while the flags of many countries are pictured, and one square of the quilt was made in Brigham Young’s family. The Springfield BepuMican collects some tough May weather stories from the Massachusetts papers. Chairman of the Selectmen Hall, of Tyringham, was called upon oh the 10th to help the Becket town Fathers clear two miles of road, more impassible from snow than at any

time during the winter, while lumbermen in Peru were hauling logs on sleds on the 9th. At Otis one of the common schools is said to have been unable to commence on the 11th because the children couldn’t get over the snow-drifts. Mt. Washington reported the snow “ hub-deep” in many places on the mountain road on the 9th, and travelers had to turn into the fields in spots, while ten-foot snow-drifts were in order on the 11th. A Queer Mistake.—The Oswego Times says: “ A prominent ‘moneyed man’ in this city who had invested quite largely in the bonds of a neighboring town cut off the April coupons of his bonds of a certain denomination and placed them with a bank in this city. The bank, of course, sent them to New York for payment In a few days the bank officers were surprised by the return of the coupons with word that they ‘would be paid when due.’ On examining them it was found that they were payable in 1887. The same mistake, of course, occurs in all the bonds of that denomination of that issue. The printer made a mistake by the use of wrong figures, and that is how a certain rich man must ‘hold on* for a while before he gets his April interest.”