Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1874 — CURRENT ITEMS. [ARTICLE]

CURRENT ITEMS.

A Hartford (Conn.) family was startled by a Heavy crash in one of their parlors tlie other night, and soon found that a red squirrel had gnawed off the cord of a picture. A Hartford man has been trying the experiment of domesticating partridges, which has so often failed. He kept them a year and got them so tame that they would eat from the hahd of a stranger. A man named O’Brien fell asleep at Bath, Me., the other day, with his' head on his hands and his elbows on a table, and, his wife happening to wake him, lie started up so suddenly us to dislocate his collar-bone. St, Louis is so fatal a place for babies—the mortality under five years running up to 50 or 60 per cent, of the whole number during the summer months —that it is proposed to establish, twenty miles out of the city, a sanitarium for babes. In Paris natural flowers are much worn at one side of tlie waist, and are arranged in thiswise: A small-bouquet is placed in a tiny glass holder containing a few drops of "water, which is then concealed in the folds of the sash. Thf, poor immigrant’s day, as regards cheap fares to the West, is over, it seems, for the present, the officials of the competing lines having buried the hatchet and agreed to restoration of the old rates —something like 150 per cent, advance on the recent tariff. Henry Dean, a New York fruit-deal-er, rendered gloomy by the robbery from his firm of $135,000 by a confidential clerk awhile since, committed suicide at Jersey City recently by throwing himself under the wheels of a passing express train. They have a six-year-old boy at Harriman, N. 11,, who weighs 146 pounds. The follbwing are his dimensions: Around the chest, forty-five inches; thigh, twentyeight inches; ankle, fifteen inches; wrist, ten inches; arm at shoulder, seventeen inches; length of leg, seventeen inches; height, forty-seven and a huff inches. The old, abandoned Fort Hale, near Nejv Haven, must be an unpleasant sort of Tiling to have around. Those unexploded shells are still lying about the ground. SomebodYhas recently dumped. a load of hay up against the magazine door to keep people away, but if this hay should happen to get on fire there would be lively times'. “ I fear,” said a minister to his flock, “ when I explained to you in my last char-ity-sermon that philanthropy was the love of our species, you must have understood me to say specie, which may account for the smallness of the collection. You will now prove, I hope, by your present contribution, that you arc no longer laboring tmder the same mistake.” A Rhode Island convict recently admitted to his spiritual guide that on one occasion he had suffered- the keenest remorse for crime. It was when he stole four cucumbers from a poor but deserving man, and ate them. That night, before the doctor got there, he made a solemn vow that, if his life were spared, he would never repeat the act, and he never has. The grasshoppers have done immense dama'ge .in Boscawen, Canterbury,' Franklin and other towns in New Hampshire. One farmer estimates that they have injured his hay crop to the amount of fifty tons, and another puts his loss at forty tons. They also made a raid among the fruit trees and corn-tassels, devouring the latter as fast as they appeared. A Mr. Rogers, of New London, Conn., died recently from the effects of soipe •foreign substance swallowed with a piece of bread some days Before. He realized immediately a severe cutting, as if some sharp substance similar to a rough piece of glaajs had passed into his stomach. He was attended by a physician, an emetic administered and other medicines given liipi, but nothing gave permanent relief. He expired in great agony.