Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1875 — BREVITIES. [ARTICLE]

BREVITIES.

Discoursing sweet jjjasic—Blowing your own trumpet. r'' « Humptulip* is tlie name of a river in Washington Territory. What’s become of Weston? Has his sole stopped marching on ? • Vulcanized rubber pavements are under trial at Pittsburgh, Pa. There are 800,000 acres of soil in India under jute cultivation. The extra sleep obtained by the use of a mosquito canopy is net gain. “ TffE onlv way to look at a lady’s faults,” exclaimed a gallant, “is to shut your eyes.” Delaware peaches are being shipped to England this season—a thing never done before. Wherever three or four thieves are banded together there may you find a “rifle” team. A Nevada paper speaks of an urchin that had been playing with a mule’s tail as “ a spoiled chila.” It looks as if Mexico was to have another revolution. She ought to have—it’s a month over time now. One cheese-manufacturer in Central New York has seen his whey to a clear profit of SII,OOO this year. Deer are very numerous in Virginia now, having greatly multiplied since the war, especially in the lowland region. Stewart says it is the hardest thing in the world for a lady to purchase goods and not try to beat the clerk down or ask for credit. «? ' Prof. Tice says that we shall have thirteen days of rain in. October, and now get your tubs and pails ready to catch rainwater. Almost anyone can start a daily newspaper, but it sometimes keeps a man scratching around pretty lively night and • day to keep it going. The next thing to perdition is an Eastern poor-house or lunatic asylum. This assertion is based on the reports of unbiased local newspapers. It must make a woman feel mean to take poison, write two or three farewell letters, upbraid her husband and then be • saved bv. a stomach-pump. ■ “ ’The strange that I remain a maid, Though fifty swains have homage paid!” “-The reason you have told,” says Fanny, You have just forty-nine too many.” Chicago is always interfering with the liberty of the citizen. It is seriously contemplated by the Council of that city to prohibit smoking on the street-cars. A lady living at Easton, Pa,, lias had a fly in her ear for ten months. Here is a woman who herself knows what a man sometimes sutlers from a constant buzz ing. The manufacture of gloves is among the growing industries of San Francisco. Two large manufactories are employing several hundred persons, many of them being young girls, who earn a handsome incoma thereby. ... 'Whence come our Aborigines?” sternly demands the Baltimore Sun. It’s easy enough to tell where they are going. They are paddling out into the vast unknown, as it were, over a limitless ocean of cheap whisky. If a man wants to be mean and show his littleness he will build his garden, fence so high that no neighbor’s cow can more than look over it and feel her mouth water at sight of the cabbages. — Detroit Free Press. The Popular Science Monthly winders if animals have a sense of humor. It wouldn’t wonder any after hearing the horse-laugh of an Oshkosh girl when her sweetheart gets back from the lumberwoods.— St. Louis Republican. Keely is said to be at work on some machinery with which he will soon exhibit his great invention as a thing accomplished. This is said of him, hut there is a motor something in the public eye, and people “can’t see it.” The Norristown Herald speaks up promptly and says: “ A Michigan stumpspeaker recently announced that 1 the country is fast drifting into arnica.’ We should think such speeches w r ould soon become a drug in the political market.” It must he humiliating for the Erie Railway, after handling nothing less than millions for years, to be dragged into a dispute with another railroad about a contemptible $30,000. It has been, however, and there is almost a chance for a lawsuit. An Englishman was lately arrested for “ stealing gas” by attaching a rubber tube to a pipe in the cellar of an unoccupied house next door to his own. He had drawn off 600,000 feet in five years. A father and son, named Cote, w T hen on a fishing excursion in Nicolet, Que., lately, kindled a fire against a tree and then went to sleep. In the meantime the fire burnt the trunk of the tree and it fell on the son and killed him. The Dundee Advertiser publishes an item of some interest to numismatologists. Having premised that money was once coined in Dundee, this journal states that the rarest specimen known of the local mint is a unique silver halfpenny of King Robert 11., in very good preservation. It is the only one of tha.t reign known to be in existence, and is, further, the only still existing regal halfpenny fcoined at Dundee in any reign. The coin is not much larger than a herring scale and only weighs seven grains. The statisticians are again advancing their well-worn theory that crime increases with the heat of the weather, and showing, by figures which they assume to be incontestable, that July is more prolific iof crimes than any other month. If the theory is sound, the present season furnishes a capital test. The summer has been remarkably cool, and ought, therefore, to show a very light crime record as compared with warmer years in the past. Will the figure-men examine the facts and report ? r A —, —.— In the recent death of Admiral Excelmans, in France, a curious coincidence is noted. His father was Marshal Exeelmans —a great cavalry' soldier of the First Empire and most famous for a wonderful charge of horse at Rocquencourt. He was in the saddle on the 10th of July, 1852, was thrown in the road and killed. On the 22d of July, 1875, his son’s mind ran strangely on that event. He talked about it all day. In the evening he rode out, was thrown and killed in the same manner. , A novel and efficient apparatus for cutting veneer has recently been contrived. There has long been in use, as is well known, a machine for cutting veneering from round blocks, but it is essentially different from the new device. In the former the knife is parallel with the log, and in some kinds of wood the beauty of the grain is thus lost, while with the knife set at an angle it is preserved; this latter is .. the merit of the new apparatus, which has a conical-shaped cutter like a .pencil-sharp-and commences catting at the end of the log, the log feeding into the knife,

or tkAnife to the log, on a lathe—the veneering coming off in the shape of a scroll. The machine cuts the veneering one-twenty-fourth of an inch thick. A journal says that goods made entirely of cotton are called merino, and have the look of merino, owing to the woolly surface imparted to them. Such goods are sold both in the United States and in the Spanish South American markets in large quantities, especially in the form of men’s undershirts and drawers. To cause the cotton to resemble wool it is scratched and the surface raised by a particular process. A thread or tw o may be drawn out and burned in the flame of a taper; if the material be cotton it will consume to a light, impalpable white ash„ cottou being a vegetable liber ; but if, on the contrary, it is wool, and therefore an animal fiber, it will twist and curl in the flame, and show a black ash, accompanied with a smell which will speak as to its origin. Cotton is now so cleverly treated that it is frequently taken for silk, also an animal fiber, and this simple test is always resorted to when there is any doubt upon this point. Reports of 117 cheese and butter sac tories in the State of New York for the season of 1874 show the following particulars: Aggregate of average number of cows for the season employed by these factories, 36,429; milk received, 118,093,222 pounds; average per cow, 3,241.73p0und5, or 377.42ga110n5; lowest average number of cows for the season employed by a single factory, 55; highest, 800; general average, 311; average length of factory season, averaged on the number of factories without regard to size, 6.24 months; regarding the average number of cows in each, 6.44 months. Of the 117 factories five are exhibited as devoted wholly or in large part to butter; 112 show an average of 331 pounds of cheese per cow; average amount of milk required for one pound of cured cheese, 9.82 pounds. These 112 factories also report 36,141 pounds of butter, averaging 1.02 pounds pe'r cow. Four factories, averaging a season of 9.58 months, exhibit 1,388 cows as the average number for the season, and 4,356.8 pounds, equivalent to 507.25 gallons of milk per cow; each cow averaging 451.8 pounds of cheese and eight pounds of butter. At last she completely cured him. For months she had patiently endured the pangs so many thousands of young wives are compelled to suffer. Almost every morning at breakfast the heartless.husband expressed the hope that he might live to see the day when h@ should get such coffee as he used to have at home. Ur guch corn-bread as his mother was wont to make and bake. At dinner the meat was overbaked in the range. To be sure bis mother used to roast the meat in an oldfashioned Dutch tin oven, and the piece was always done to a turn—the last turn of tlie revolving-spit. Those days were forever gone. But lie might and ought to get such a green apple pie with new cheese as his mother used to give him. At length the long-suffering wife arose in her wrath, upset the table, sending the dishes and tlieir contents crashing to the carpet, strided over to her astounded husband, gave him a box on the ear which knocked liimoft’his chair, and remarked: “ There’s a clip over the head for you, such as your mother used to give you when you was a boy, gol clem yer.” Thereafter there was domestic peace and quiet in that house, with never even an allusion to the maternal cookery and comforts of the bygone days.— N. Y. World.