Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1875 — GLEANINGS. [ARTICLE]

GLEANINGS.

""—Herbert Spencer assails the theory that married life is most favorable to longevity. ‘ —ln a recent accident on the PanHandle route John G. Saxe, the poet, nearly lest his life. —Not less than seventy tons of nitroglycerine are now consumed annually for blasting purposes. —The total strength of the volunteer forcespof Great Britain was at the ena of last year 236 683 men. —We must be very near specie payments and a hard money policy. Money is very hard, anyhow—tojget. —A Hint. —“ 1 wish I was a pudding, mamma!” “Why?” “Cause I should have such lots of sugar put into me.” —lt was the prose of the countingroom and not the poetry of “Thanatopsis” which made Bryant wealthy. —The first child born in this country of Japanese parents Ms the daughter of the Japanese Minister at Washington. —Carlyle says that “ England is populated by forty million souls —mostly fools.” Of course he makes a minority report. —Mrs. Gen. Hawley says that Mrs. President Grant is going blind and cannot aee to write even to one of her own children. —ln the family of Charles Cornell, of New York city, six children out of a family of eight recently died of malignant diphtheria. •» —lt is not generally known that the butter crop of the United States is now creator in value than the wheat crop. Yet such is the fact. —Tire Courier-Journal thinks that every man who carries a cane under his arm to put people’s eyes out with should be ynched without warning. —Tennessee has a scholastic population of 420,384. Number of pupils enrolled in 1874, 258,577. Number of teachers employed, 5,551.

—The St. Louis Globe thinks that the much-heralded Danburian does not amount to much, except as a specimen of cheek and bad printing. —At Zinwald, in Germany, a widow of 108 has just, married a man of sixty. One of the bride's children, aged eighty, was present at the wedding. —The New York World states that the Khedive's diamonds given to Gen. Sherman's daughter arc on color for the most part, and are worth $50,000 or less. —.Tames McCullogh committed suicide in New York the other day by jumping into an immense cog-wheel. His body was cut into an hundred small pieces. —lt is said that in the State of Delaware, in 1804, 4,000 persons were added to the Methodist Church. During the last conference year 2,300 converts were reported. —Mrs. Fawcett, wife of the blind member of Parliament, Pnf»f. Fawcett, and author of “ Tales in Political Economy,” is about to make her first appearance as a novelist. . ■ —The will of a Benjamin F. Beekman, of New York, gives his widow the interest on SIO,OOO while she is such widow and gives her the principal should the marry again. —The oldest Episcopal minister in grooklyn is Rev. Dr. Deller. He has officiated in that city nearly forty years and is the present rector of St. Luke’s, Clinton avenue. —There is said to he such an increase of the disgusting habit of snuff-dinning among the factory operatives of New England that snuff factories are increasing with the demand. —A marblesiatue of George D. Prentice is to be placed over the doorway of the Louisville Courier-Journal office.’ It 'is now under the chisel, will be eight feet high and will cost SIO,OOO. —Three nFwsboys played hanging at Williamsport, Pa. The one that enacted the role of the condemned murderer was cut down just in time to save his life and give his parents more trouble. —Mr. George 11. Stuart, of Philadelphia, estimates the number of conversions in Great Britain through the instrumentality of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, of Chicago, at 25,000 or 30,000. —The Sheriff at Kershaw, N, C„ has. levied on a monkey to satisfy a debt. This was a good-enough case of natural selection, he doubtless thinks,' to result in the origin of specie for the judgment. —When Brigham Young was in jail the other day "for contempt of court i there were five of his wives weeping at j each window of that institution, ami, twelve at the door.

—Eli Crozier, an ancient citizen of Delaware, swore thirty-one years ago to wear the hat he then wore until Henry Clay should sit in the Presidental chair. The venera b ie beaver still ci owns his wrinkled brow. —A man who came to ihe city yesterday morning visited the No. 3 enginehouseand set his watch by the steamgauge of the engine, which measured twentv pounds Of steam. — Fat Contributor's Paper. —Coal oil is a sure cure for chilblains and frosted feet, and also for corns. The only question is to keep the affected parts timttantly sa t united, For chapped hands use glycerine. Ten cents’ worth will last a whole season. —The Children's Pudding.—Quarter of a pound of suet, quarter of a pound of flour, quarter of a pound of currants, two ounces of sugar, two teaspoonfyls pf molasses, juice and peel of one lemon, milk; ’ Boil in mold three hours. —California views unmoved the first female student of medicine within her borders. She, of course, is a New Englander by birth and has taught school. She has gone into the medical department of the University of California. —ln South Carolina 45,774 white and 58,964 black children attend school —not quite one-half of those who ought to be now acquiring a rudimentary education. Gov. Chamberlain complains that the educational appropriations are insufficient

—A crazy man in Bridgeport, Conn., a few days since, wandering through a cemetery, saw an open box beside a newmade grave, awaiting the arrival of the corpse. He quietly lowred the box and had the dirt all in before the procession arrived. —Lady Burdett Goutts wants a society for the prevention of cruelty to hum-ming-birds. From personal knowledee she certifies that. one Parisian milliner uses of these birds every season, and reasonably predicts that, slaughtered at this rate, they will soon be extinct. —While Mr. Alden Morse, of Philipsburg, Me., was at work with a circular saw in his mill, recently, and in the act of reaching forward to clear a slab, it flew with great force, striking him in the forehead, fracturing his skull and tearing his face in a terrible manner.

—A youngster, While warming his hands over the kitchen fire, was remonstrated with by his father, who said, “Go ’way from the stove; the weather is not cold?’ The little fellow, looking up at his stern parent demurely, replied: “I ain't heating’the weather; I’m warmin’ my hands.” —Tjic “ Univcrealist Register” for 1875 shows 674 ministers—an increase of 17; 622 churches—an increase of 16; 80,903 church members—3,lo4 more than in 1874; 647 Sunday-schools—a decrease of 14; and 57,738 Sunday-scTiool scholars — an increase of several thousand. The amount of church property is about $8,000,000. -r-He is neat, natty and ninety-three; drives through a drenching winter storm to Syracuse, N. Y., to transact business pertaining to a farm of 200 acres, which he runs himself, and when on a visit to hfs native town iu Massachusetts, after sixty-five years’ absence, is waited upon by a committee who wished to be informed accurately upom-some historical matters relating to the place. —A singular rite of superstition was recently conducted at Newport, R. I. The relatives of a person who had died of consumption, and who believed that cremation of the intestines of the deceased would prevent the disease from attacking the survivors, exhumed the body and burned those parts, but another member of the family has since died of the disease. —At Bethel, Vt„ a few days since, Duane Wood, twenty-one years of age, committed suicide in his father’s woodshed by shooting himself with a pistol. The deed was committed very deliberately. Qne shot entering the bowels, and not proving immediately fatal, the young man reloaded the pistol and shot himself the second time, the ball entering near the heart and killing him instantly. —<}uite an interesting suit was tried at M are, Mass., lately, between two prominent business men of the town. It seems there had been a little dispute between them relating to money matters, which ended in the one calling the other by the not very dignified name of a “ hog,” whereat he was so much displeased that he sued him for $lO. The Judge decided that the defendant had injured the plaintiff's charactdf’to the extent of $5. —A genuine, crasive soap that will re-, move grease and stains“ from clothiitgTssaid to be made as follows: Two pounds of goodcastilc soap; half a pound of carbonate Of potash, dissolved in half a pint of hot witter. Cut the soap in thin slices; boil the soap with the potash Until it is thick enough to mold in cakeS; add alcohol, half an ounce; camphor, half an ounce; hartshorn, half an ounce; color with half an ounce of pulverized charcoal. ’ . —The permanent school fund of Neva da has been increased from $104,000 to $250,000 in the past two years. Out of the school population of *6,305, only 923 were non-attendants last year—education being compulsory in Nevada. The Superintendent declares the Compulsory school law to be a very popular measure. Efforts are making to move the State University, now established at Elkuo, to the western part of the State. —A New York paper tells a story on a connoisseur among our cousins over the water. An English picture collector bought an enormously valuable “old master” on the Continent, and inorder to get it into England under light duty had a modern “.daub” painted over the old master. When they washed off the daub the old master went with it and left behind a portrait of George III.; so it wasn’t a verv old master.

—The husband of Christine Nilsson says that one of the most painful phases of his wife’s ailment is insomnia. Poor Caudle used to say just the same thing in reference to Mrs. C.’s trouble, and innumerable husbands of our own acquaintance declare insomnia to be the very worst malady to which wives are subject. It is a remarkable fact, tod, that when wives are inflicted with insomnia husbands are sleepless from sympathy.— Arcadian. —Funeral rites and ceremonies in China are quite Chinese. Custom and law require, on the point of. burying, silk garments to be burned as Well as pieces of money to be destroyed for the needs which the defunct are supposed to have in*the ghost-land. At the interment of the late Emperor these ceremonies were carried out on a large scale, seeing that an Emperor has more need of money than anybody else, for dinners, balls, servants, carriages, etc. —The Baptist Committee, in their address to the denomination concerning the Centennial, say that sect has grown from 25,000 in 1776 to nearly 1,750,000 communicants, with 13,000'houses of worship and sittings in them for 4,000,000. They were then poor, had only a few horseback missionaries, one wean college : now they have money enough, missions all over the world, and thirty colleges. besides numerous academies, and six theological seminaries. —A lady was felling a friend from the country of a very grand party she had given recently. “We had two Generals, one Judge, a popular author and a play writer.” “ Yes,” chimed in her wicked son, “ and there was a Deputy Sheriff, too, who said he wanted to see dad, and they went out before supper, and f dad hasn't got home yet.” M hen that youth went to school the next day with his head all tied up, he told the boys he had a dreadful toothache. —Poor Author’s Pudding.—Flavor a quart of new milk by boiling in it for a few minutes half a stick of well-bruised cinnamon or the thin rind of a small lemon; add a few grains of salt and three ounces of sugar and turn the whole into a deep basin; when it is cold stir *to it three well-beaten eggs and strain the mixture into a pie-dish. Cover the top entirely with slices of bread free from crust and half an inch thick, cut so as to join neatly, and buttered on both sides; bake the pudding in a moderate oven tor half an hour.

—The whole number of students attending Michigan University is 1,191. The university library contains at present 22,500 volumesand over .7,ooopamphlets. The libraries accessible to the students amount in the aggregate to over 31,000 volumes. There are present in the university, exclusive of the President, twenty-five professors, one adjunct professor’ seven assistant professors, nine instructors, and a special lecturer. There are sixty-nine ladies in the literary department, forty-eight in the medicaLand three in the law department. —Saturday morning at one o’clock the police found a horse and cutter coming in from the country on the Pontiac road, with the driver so nearly frozen that he was lopped over on the seat and unconscious, He was taken to the station and they thawed him out after an hour or so.

When he could speak he asked: “ Sergeant, will I live?” 7 “Oh, yes, I guess so,” was the answer. “ Well, I'm sorry,” mused the young man. “I wanted to die, so that they could put on my tombstone; ‘Here lies one who was Tool enough to ride twenty-six miles to spark a red-headed girl.’ ’’ — Detroit Press. j —Never have the American be'e-keep-ers been able to supply the market with pure honey. But the honey-dealers have sometimes found the means of filling all the wants and their pockets at the same time. Here is the recipe: Take one gallon of honey and seven gallons of sugar syrup, mix well and it is done. Some put the mixture in glass jars with a few bits of comb. Some use “ glucose,” a kind of syrup made in France with potatoes and sbld in Chicago for four or five cents per pound. A New York honey-dealer has disclosed the whole matter to the editor of the Bee-Keepers' Journal. —Somebody with nothing better to do Jias scnt_a hitter to the Fostoffice in Chicago withall this address: lu that alluring Empress of the Wi st. Famed for mighty conflagrations; divorces, tumults, and the rest. Dwells the hero of this pother, Alfred Spencer, known by name. With K. between to make complete. Postmaster, take me to the same ; Let me tell you (I'm not joking) how to know the vet.'ran brick— By a dark-stained meerschaum; smoking—by a huge, gold-headed stick. By the scent of “ 'Frisco - ' honey, which doth ever 'round him hang— By a ping hat. tail and shiny—by—but ’nough said, git, g'lang!! I —The origin of the Ayrshire breed o cows is not uninteresting. A poor farmer in Scotland in 1750, finding it almost impossible to subsist, took great pains to have his children drive his cow where she could eat the richest and thickest grass, tp house her in winter and feed her with carefully-housed hay—in fine took unheard-of care of his cow. The grateful animal rewarded her owner with a fine calf and an unusual abundance of milk, and thus the celebrated breed of Ayrshire cows was produced, though it was not till the first of the present century that it was brought to perfection.

—A correspondent of a Ceylon newspaper says that large apes are now regularly employed in the Straits settlements to. pull cocoanuts. These monkeys are imported from Acheen in batches, like coolies, and are marched round the plantations by their owners, who let them out On hire. A line is first attached to each ot these peculiar laborers, and he is then sent up a tree, where he is said to select suitable fruit with great discrimination, and to twist the nut round and round until it falls to the ground. Each successive fall of a nut is hailed by the hairy operator above with a jump and a chuckle of satisfaction. —A gentleman who rode his own horse in the course of an Eastern tour asked his Arab attendant if he was quite sure she always got her allowance. “Oh, yes,”he replied; “my countrymen often steal from one another and rob their friends’ horsts, but I can always find out if your mare has been cheated.” “How?” “ I always put some pebbles in with the barley —seven or eight—and count exactly how many I put in. The mare ueyer eats the pebbles, and if anyone steals the barley he is sure to take two or three pebbles with it. If I find the pebbles short in the morning I have hard words, and they cannot tell how I know, so they give up’cheating her.” —Mary E. Aborns was advertised b her husband in San Jose, Cal., as having left her bed and board without just cause, and so forth. Mrs. Aborns retorted in a card, in which she said that she had been married ten years, and in that time had cooked about 10,000 meals, spent 15,000 hours over a hot stove, borne six children, milked cows over 10,000 times, and performed other house hold duties in proportion. She adds: “ I have drawn the picture very mildly. I have made allowances for my sickness, when I have had help, something after the way that a farmer would lire a horse if his own was sick and unable to work. I had nothing when I wenj there, and nothing at the end of those ten years of servitude.”

—According to an official statement there are 22,871 persons at Berlin who have to pay taxes on their incomes, viz.: One of them has an annual income of 600,000 thalers, one of 480,000 thalers, one of 320,000 thalers, one of 240,000 thalers, two Of 200,000 thalers, two of 180,000 thalers, one of 160,000 thalers, three of 140,000 thalers, seven of 120,000 thalers three of 100,000 thalers, ten of 80,000 to 100,000 thalers, nine of 68,000 to 80,000 thalers, seventeen of 56 000 to 68,000 thalers, thirteen of 48,000 to 56,000 thalers; consequently seventy-one persons have each more"than 48.000 thalers a year. Two hundred and forty-four’ persons hare each 20,000 to 48,000 thalers a year, and 471 persons have each 9,600 to 20,000 thalers a year. —A practical joke was played on the critic of one of the Paris papers at the last performance of “ Orphee aux Enters” at the Gaiete. Mdlle. Angele, who acted the part of Venus, took offense at some remarks made by the unfortunate scribe and vowed revenge. The critic, who occupied a stall, did not for a moment anticipate the vengeance of Venus, who at the end of the first act, when the electric light is turned on the inhabitants of Olympus, who are about to visit the terrestial globe, adroitly reflected the powerful rays of light into the very eyes of the journalist by ..means of the" steel mirror she holds in her hand. The gods and, goddesses on the stage were convulsed with laughter when they saw him trying to evade the blindingrays of light, shielding his eyes with his hand and hiding behind trie seat in front of him.

—A man in San Francisco entered a police station in a state of intense excitement and told the Captain that he wanted to prefer a charge against his room-mate. “We both wanted to go to heaven,” he said, “ and we knew we couldn't get there if we committed suicide. We talked the matter over a good deal and finally we agreed to kill each other. The plan was for each to have a sharp razor ready at the other’s throat, and at a signal cut as hard and deep as we could. We got all readv, with the razors at our throats, and I gave the word. I cut his throat all right, but he failed to do as he agreed and here I am alive. I want to make a regular charge of false pretenses against him so he can’t get into heaven.” The Captain locked up the maniac, for such he was, and went to the room described by him? There he found that a man had been murdered by haring his throat cut while asleep in bed. The lunatic had invented the rest of the story, and white under an hallucination had committed tne deed. —One of the earliest processes in the preparation of hides for tanning is the removal of the hair. This is sometimes effected by inducing a slight putrefac-

lion, which loosens the epidermis and renders the hairs easily detachable. But in England and America the method usually adopted is to place the hides in a large vat or pit containing milk of lime, in which they are frequently moved so as to allow the lime to act equally on every part. After from sixteen to twenty days the hair is easily removed by a blunt scraper. In Germany, Austria and Belgium, however, the trade is reported to have all but abandoned the old method of unhairing in favor of one in which sulphide of sodium is the depilatory agent; the sulphide of sodium is a crystalline form being now specially manufactured for the purpose in Germany. The process is modified in various ways to meet the peculiarities of the metal operated upon. Sometimes, w’here it is necessary that the hair should be removed as quickly as possible, as in the. case of sole leather, the hides are painted with a paste consisting of one part of crystallized sulnhide of sodium and three parts of lime. The hjdes are covered with damp matting to prevent the drying of the paste, and in fifteen or twenty hours the process is complete and the hides can be unhaired. In other cases the skins are steeped in a solution of sulphide of sodium—one pound to one hundred quarts—when the time required is two or three days. Where the hides are to be unhaired by hand it is necessary that they should be first well rinsed with water, and the men employed in the laying on the paste are usually provided with india-rubber gloves, on account,of its corrosive properties.