Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1875 — Page 1

HORACE E. JAMES A JOSHUA HEALEY, Proprietors.

VOL. VIII.

THE OLD FAIIM-GATE. The old farm-gate hangs, sagging down, On rusty hinges, bent arid urown; Its latch is gone, and, here and there, It shows rude traces of repair. That old farm-gateias seen, each year, The blossoms bloom and disappear; The bright-greeri leaves of spring unfold, And turn to autujnn’s’red and gold, v ./ ■ The children have upon it clung, And, in and out, with raptnre swung, When their young hearts were good and pure, When hope was fair and faith was sure. Beside that gate, have lovers true Told the old story, always new; Have made their vows; have dreamed of bliss, And sealed each promise with a kiss. The old farm-gate has' opened wide To welcome home thy Jjew-made bride, When lilacs bloomed, and locusts fair With their sweet fragrance filled the air. That gate, with rusty weight and chain Has closed upon the solemn train That bore her .lifeless form away, Upon a dreary autumn day. The lichens gray and mosses green Upon its rotten posts are seen; Initials, carved with youthful skill, Long years ago, are on it still. Yet dear to me above all things, By reason of the thoughts it brings, Is that old gate, now sagging down, On rusty hinges, bent arid brown. —Euycne J. llctlL

THE BASHFUL LOVER.

John Patterson was driving his venerable horse slowly homeward from the little village of Briarton. They were passing the low-lying farm of Nathan Wynne, and John, without daring for the life of him to turn his head, rolled his great black eyes toward the substantial stone farm-house in the hope of catching a glimpse of Kitty, the farmer’s comely daughter. But, 'though John kept his eyes turned in their sockets till his head ached fearfully, he saw nothing of Kitty. John was desperately in love ’with Kitty Wynne and had been for many a day, and yet dared not tell her so. Tell her that he loved her and ask her to marry him ? Why, he would not so much as look at her when there was any danger of his being caught at it for the world, and simply because he could not, for it was John’s misfortune to be excessively bashful. He generally made out to bow to her when he met' her, but even that always brought a great lump into his throat and turned his face the color of a peony. As Johnqvasseito-tver-a-'Hile knoil and out of— -stgliGof--the- house, the farmer’s great orchard—the trees ready to break down under their weight of ripe fruit — was before him. “ What a while that miller kept me waiting for my grist. I’m as hungry as a bear. I must have a pocketful of those yellow beauties to eat on my way home.” And with this John drew rein on his horse, scaled the fence and struck, out in a bee line for his favorite tree. He knew as well as Farmer Wynne did, and in fact every man and boy around knew, just where the best apples were to be found, for Nathan was not one of those men whom large and small boys of predatory habits designate as a “ stingy old blinks.” His fruit was as free to all as the water in the little brook which divided the orchard by its never-ceasing flow. John had filled his pockets, and was about to retrace his steps to the wagon when he caught the flutter of a pink dress through a cluster of quince trees, and heard Kitty's merry voice in conversation with some one. Stealing a hasty glance through the trees John recognized Kitty’s companion to be her cousin, Hetty Shaw, from the village. They were coming directly toward the tree under which John was standing. What in the world Was he to do? He did not fancy running away like a detected thief, and his trembling knees and palpitating heart warned him that if he would not die then and there he must seek a place of concealment. To add to John’s bucketful of embarrassment on this occasion he was conscious that he was not in the least “fixed up.” He was in his every-day garb, and there was a huge black patch on the knee of his gray pantaloons; and John hated patches because he was poor and obliged to wear them. The sleeves of his coat were far too short, as also the legs of his pants, and to make tfle matter worse his clothes-were covered with flour which he had somehow got on while he was waiting for his grist at the mill. John glanced upTnto the tree, bub the foliage was not thick, ami there was little chance for a hiding-place there. Near the tree was an inverted hogshead, which had been used as a stand from which to pick apples from the tree. The hogshead had once been used as a temporary clog-kennel, and a hole perhaps eighteen inches in diameter had been made to admit the dog. There was no time to be lost. -The hogshead afforded the only retreat within the trembling young man’s reach, and he was not long in squeezing himself inside of it. The girls came on and sat down on the grass right where John, by stooping down and peering through the circular hole, could watch them. Kitty, he thought, looked prettier and brighter than ever in her pink dress, and the sun, which was settling into the west, made her brown hair ag golden as the apples in her lap. Kitty held up an apple by the stem, saying: “ Name it, Hetty; but not Will Joyce, _.nor,Jefry Davis, nor ” M There, stop; the apple is named,’? said Hetty, merrily. Kitty pared and ate her apple, carefully saving* all the seeds. When she had them all in her chubby hand she held them*out for Hetty to spell the name. Touching each seed with her finger, Hetty spelled: “ J-o-h-n P-a-t-t-e-r-s-o-n.” “It spells it exactly. Why, Kitty, what are you blushing so for? One would think that fellow’s name was spelled out in your heart in indelible letters by the way you look.” Kitty said nothing, though she looked uncommonly sober for her, John thought, and he wondered if the girls didn’t hear his heart beat; he thought they must, it

THE RENSSELAER UNION.

was thumping away so furiously. He thought, too, that Kitty was angry that anyone would suppose that she cared for him. How t humbly he felt; he could scarce have told why; and how his cheeks burned with the flush of wounded pride. “ Now, really, Kitty,” said her cousin, with a bantering laugh, “if you don’t drive away that forlorn look I shall think you care more than your pride will let you acknowledge for that great, awkward booby, who hasn’t tlie courage, nor never will have, to ask you to have him.” “ Hush, Hetty!” said Kitty, as she rose to her feet, and her cheeks glowed with a flush of deepest crimson. “You do not know John Patterson we do, or you would not utter what you have. He is. not awkward at home with his mother. You ought to see how kind and considerate he is to her. Father drops in there often, and he says there isn’t a more noblehearted man to be found. Yesterday, you, Hetty, were making game of John because he wears clothes that are patched and oldfashioned. John is industrious, and do you know what he does with his money ? Father says he is paying off the mortgage on his mother’s little farm, and that when he has a few dollars more than are necessary for a payment he expends it for books. Mark my word, lletty, John Patterson will yet be a man that you will be proud to class among your friends. He has intellect of no common order. It’s only his great bashfulness that keeps him back now.” • “ Now, Kitty, you are too absurd,” and Hetty laughed as though she thought her' companion in jest. “ Well, it is leapyear; you had better offer yourself to this paragon. I don’t believe he will refuse.” “ I know no one whom I would sooner marry—so, there!” And Kitty’s face was scarlet with blushes as she made this frank acknowledgment. But John was not looking at her now. He was crouched in the most remote -part of the hogshead, trying, by various gestures, to drive away a huge nfastiff which threatened to make his whereabouts known. The sun had gone down, and John’s hungry horse had quietly walked off home, and still the two girls chatted away. “ Well, Bruno, what have you got in there? I’m sure you’ve been whining and pawing there for half an hour, at least.” And lletty came forward and patted the dog’s hairy back with her hands. “ Why, Kitty, there is some dreadful animal in here. What apair ofeyesithas! Are there any wild-cats in the woods? Thank my nerves, if uncle and Charley are away, I can fire a gun. I’ll soon know what that horrid creature is. In my opinion, here is where your geese have gone to. I’ll warrant the ground in there is strewn with bones. ‘ You and Bruno keep watch while ! run to the house for a gun.” Hetty had rattled all this off in a breathless fashion, and before Kitty had time to look at the “dreadful animal,’’ only the great, luminous eyes of which fbuld be seen, her cousin was on her way to the house.

RENSSELAER, JASPER COUNTY, INDIANA, SEPTEMBER 30, 1875.

What was John to do now? Stay where he was and be shot by the courageous little Hetty, or crawl from his lair like a Hottentot from his hut, and right before Kitty’s eyes, too? The faithful dog began to wag his tail and whine with renewed animation, and John thought the gun must be coming surely. Life was sweeter to him now, since hearing what Kitty had said of himself, than ever before, and, creeping to the opening, he began the get-ting-out process. Kitty, who was peering anxiously in, saw that “ the creature” was moving—that it was coming toward her —and giving a spasmodic little scream she sank helplessly to the ground, and covered her face with her apron. Kitty’s distress made John for the moment forget that he was the most bashful man alive, and surely the arms which Kitty felt encircling her waist were not those of a wild beast. Knowing this, it did not need a great ariiount of courage to enable her to-uncover her fiiceand see that the great eyes which had so frightened her belonged to John Patterson. It was strange that neither she nor John, during the half hour they tarried together under the apple-tree, thought of Hetty or the gun she had gone to bring. Perhaps neither would have remembered Hetty’s boasted “ nerve” in connection with the use of that weapon again had not that young lady herself two years later reminded a certain happy bridegroom and his equally happy bride of the incident, and informed them that she knew all the time that John was in the hogshead, as she saw him put himself there, and that Tier part of the conversation under the apple-tree was indulged in solely with a view to encourage the bashful lover to propose. Mrs. John Patterson scolded her cousin-bride-maid for her duplicity, but for all that it was plain to be seen she was no£ angry, especially since Hetty had that very day acknowledged that she was proud to class her cousin’s handsome husband among her friends.— N. Y. Weekly. —The Dover (Tenn.) Record states that while a little daughter of Mrs. Nancy Haskins, of Houston County, was asleep on the floor in its mother’s house it “ cried that a rail had fallen on its finger and smashed it.” The mother, thinking the child was dreaming, paid no attention to it. When daylight came a sight appeared to her gaze that chilled her blood. By the side of the pallet was a rattlesnake some three and a half feet in length, and in the mouth of which was the child’s thumb. The noise made by the mother startled the snake, which glided through the crack. Upon examination of the child’s thumb it was found to be lacerated very much and torn by the fangs of the snake, the effect of which was soon visible on the child, and at one time it was thought impossible to save its life, but it was saved, we learn, by a remedy of Dr. Nixon, of that county, which is moss made into tea and drank, and used also as a poultice. The snake was killed the same morning by some young men. —“My son,” said a stern father to a seyen-year-old hopeful,‘“l must discipline you. Your teacher says you are the worst boy in the school.” “’Well, papa,” was the reply, “only yesterday she told mC 1 was just like my father.”

Death in the Nursing Bottle.

In a city like ours, where the death rate at the present season averages 700 to 800 per week, mostly children, every humane person feels the necessity of increased vigilance to combat every evil which tends to Increase “the slaughter of the innocents.” High temperature is one of the causes which we are powerless to combat. Dirty streets and filthy houses we must "leave to the Board of Health. Poverty of the parents, which prevents their providing suitable food and medicine for their little ones, is another cause of our great infantile mortality, against which we can and ought to do something. But ignorance is another cause, too often overlooked, against which we are not powerless if we organize for action. The daily papers warn old and young against the dangers of unripe fruit and stale watermelons; but people will indulge, and we must allow the American citizen, however young, to exercise his inalienable right to take his own life in this way. But there is another prolific source of infant mortality to which we wish now to direct special attention, namely: the patent nursing bottle. It consists of a rubber tube, one end of which is held in the child’s mouth; the other end, passing through a cork, is attached to a glass rod which descends to the bottom of a bottle of so-called milk. We might write a column on the dangers that reside in the milk, unless special care has been taken to obtain it fresh or by suitably diluting pure condensed milk. But this danger is well known, and our business at present is with the bottle, or rather its dirty tube, which should never be used' more than once'fthen thrown away and a new one bought. Even when new, these white tubes, impregnated as they are with oxide of zinc, are not unobjectionable; far worse are they when saturated with sour milk, germs of putrefaction, decay and disease. Some of these child-murdering Yankee inventions have reached Berlin, and have called forth the following from a practicing physician of that city: “ The supposed advantage of these bottles consists in this, that they can be placed beside the infant in bed, while other bottles must be held in the hand all the time. What sensible mother or nurse would have a child with a-bottle without watching it? The danger of the bottle consists in this, that it is absolutely impossible to cleanse it. When sucked on, little particles of milk become attached to the tube and cork; these curdle and soon turn sour. If some of this deposit be placed under a microscope we see innumerable bacteria, organic beings which indicate decompositiqn and decay. At every meal the child draws in thousands of these germs. The decomposition process acts upon what it finds in tha mouth, esophagus and stomach; and the result is diarrhea, cholera, infantum, etc. I will here expressly remark that the usual method of placing the apparatus in water, or merely rinsing it out with a stream of water” is in no way. sufficient. Some dealers sell a suitable little wire brush with the bottle, but even this does not answer the purpose, for the apparatus is not clean by a long way after drawing the brush through it several times; and who will take the trouble to clean it so thoroughly eight or ten times a day? How much time it would require! Another disadvantage is that the bottle is air-tight, and a partial vacuum is formed, which renders sucking so difficult as tmexhaust the child, and it stops before its hunger is satisfied. Hence, parents, ye who are compelled to feed your children with a bottle, throw away this apparatus, which can only bring destruction upon your children, and either select a bottle with glass mouthpiece, which is filled from below, or take a large rubber mouthpiece, which is perforated by a small hole and can be drawn directly over the neck ot the glass bottle. This large mouthpiece or nipple can readily be turned inside out and thoroughly cleaned and rubbed with dry salt.” —Scientific American.

Carving.

It is only of late years that the duty of carving has fallen to the lot of the master of the house. The work of dismembering a fowl or reducing a roast to-slices before our time was always performed by the mistress of the establishment. We learn from the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that a century ago there were in England professed carving-masters, who taught young ladies the art scientifically. This task must have required ho small share of bodily strength, for the lady was not only to invite—that is, urge and tease — her guests to eat more than human throats could conveniently swallow, out to carve every dish when chosen with her own hands. The greater the lady, the more indispensable the duty. Each joint in its turn was carried up to be operated upon by her, and by her alone, since the peers and knights on either hand were so far from being bound to ofler their assistance that the very master of the house, posted opposite to her, might not act as her croupier. His department was to push , the bottle after dinner. As for the crowd of guests, the most inconsiderable among them —the curate, or subaltern, or ’Squire’s younger brother—if suffered through her neglect to help himself to a slice of mutton placed before him, would have chewed it in bitterness, and gone home an affronted man, half-inclined to give a wrong vote at the next election. Lady Montagu said she took lessons-three times a week, that she might be perfect in the art on such occasions as she was required to preside at her father’s table. In order to perform hex duties successfully she was obliged to eat her own dinner alone an hour or two beforehand. The mistress of a house at this point occupied not only a very 'important, but a very laborious, position. It must be mentioned that tire profusion of provisions in the banquets of'the time bordered upon barbarous magnificence, compared to the elegant modes of preparing dishes in the present day, and called for dininghalls and kitchens of sufficient dimensions to avoid the confusion that must otherwise have occurred. Hence the superintendence of a household was a labor of great extent and responsibility. It was held that a woman had no right to enter the estate of matrimony unless pos-

sessed of a good knowledge of cookery. Otherwise she could perform but half heR vow. She might love and obey, but she could not cherish. To be perfect in this art she must know in which quarter of the moon to plant and gather all kinds of herbs and salads throughout' the year, She must also be “ cleanly, have a quick eye, a curious nose, a perfect taste, and a ready ear,” and be neither butter-fingered; sweet-toothed, nor faint-hearted. For if she were the first of these she would let everything fall; if the second, she would consume that which she should increase; and if the third, she would lose time with too much nicen&s. For an ordinary feast, with which any goodman might entertain his friends, about sixteen dishes were considered a suitable supply for the firstcourse. This included such substantial articles as a shield of brawn with mustard, a boiled capon, a piece of boded beef, a chine of beef roasted, a neat’s tongue roasted, a pig roasted, minced chickens made into balls, a roasted goose, a swan, a turkey, a haunch of venison, a venison pasty, a kid with a pudding in it, an olive pie, a couple of roast capons and a custard. Besides these principal dishes the housewife added as many salads, fricassees, and pasties as made thirty-two dishes, which were considered as many as it was polite to put upon the table for a- first course. Then followed second and third courses, in which many of tlie dishes were for show only, but were so tastefully made as to contribute much to the beauty of the feast. With the carving and distribution of such a variety of dishes as these to attend to, the “ burden of the honor” of presiding over a banquet must have pressed heavily upon the housewife whose duty it was to see to the ordering of the feast —Harper's Weekly

The Guikwar’s Gems—“ The Star of the South.”

Leaving the “throne-room through a small door on the right hand side, we find ourselves on an extremely narrow veranda, which encircles a small square well which occupies the center of the palace from top to bottom. Above we see similar verandas, and a number of natives looking overthe railings. Beneath area number of Arabs and other soldiers, Keeping watch over several things, among them a sacred flag which is hung across the well oft occasions of high festival. On the opposite side are a number of closed stanchioned windows, which guard the jewel-room or jemdarkhana. Moving to the right there are rooms which look like» dungeons and are guarded by sentries. At thb end of the veranda we enter a little, close-smelling room, which would bedark were it not for the light of some wicks thrown in a salver of oil—a light which, we are told, is never allowed to be extinguished,... so that it to some extent resembles the holy fire of the Parsees. Here, in a corner on the left, is a door—the outer entrance to the jewel-room. After some delay an elderly Mahratta makes his appearance and opens the lock, and we enter a room which is as black as night and awfully stale smelling. One of the grated windows facing the well is thrown open and by the little light thus obtained we perceive a number of shelves, which are loaded with State archives. Another ponderous black door being unbarred, we enter a dark room—the jewel-room. While a window is being opened we prepare to be surprised with the flash of a thousand jewels, but are rather disappointed to find only a number of iron-clamped chests of drawers ranged round the room. But these drawers'contain the State jewelry, worth £3,000,000 sterling, report, says; and on the custodian pulling out one of the deep drawers in a central chest and producing enormous morocco-covered cases, which are opened tenderly, we have no need to be longer disappointed, for a sight of a novel description meets our eyes. Here in one case lies displayed a breast-piece composed of chains of diamonds, numbering seventy-nine in all. All the diamonds are beautiful, but there are three in the pendant of ten which are conspicuously so, while one at least deserves to be called magnificent. This particular one occupies the center of the pendant, and is, I believe, known as the Star of the South. It is nearly as large as a rupee, and its brilliance would, if you were inclined to be more poetical than covetous, remind you of nothing so much as a mass of Indian sunlight, gathered from the haunts the sun beats upon with greatest intensity, and into, the sparkling block before us. This diamond cost Khunderao £90,000, and, like all great diamonds, has a history, though not such an interesting one, perhaps, as the Sancy diamond, which, you will remember, was found in the bodj' of a servant of Baron de Sancy, who hgd been deputedlo, carry it, as a present, to the King of France, but, being attacked by robbers on the way, swallowed it in order to baffle their attempts to find it. According to Harry Emmanuel, one of our standard authorities on the history of great diamonds, the Star of the South was found in 1853 at Bogagem, in the Province of Minas Geraes, by a negro. When rough it weighed 254)4 carats, but since the cutting it weighs only 125 carats. It is of an oval form, and was cut by—and was, before it found its way to India and tempted the Guikwar, the property of —Mr' Coster, of Amsterdam. It is not perfectly white and pure; but, nevertheless, it is reckoned one of the finest large diamonds in the world. The large oblong diamond fixed above the Star is flat, and possesses nothing like the purity and brilliancy of its great rival. It cost £300,000. The whole breast-piece of diamonds cost over half a million sterling, and is one of the most beautiful necklaces of that description extant. When we have finished admiring the Star of the South and Its seventy-eight multiradiant companions we are shown a necklace composed of a number of chains of pearls, each of remarkable size and purity. This necklace is valued at £50,000. I have been told that pearls do not retain their beauty for more than titty years; and I could not help thinking it a ‘pity that fate would not permit such a thing of beauty as this necklace to remain a joy forever. Drawer alter drawer is opened and case after case of jewels displayed, until the miserable dungeon seems to begin 'to look radiant. Kings, with

stones in them large enough to stretch across three of your fingers; necklaces of diamonds, mostly flat and dull-looking, ’with pearl-shaped emerald drops; noserings of pearls and emeralds; ear-rings of wheels of diamonds and chains of gold; these and similar curiosities aredisplayed in succession before our delighted eyes until we are sated with sights, and leave the old Mahratta, who has watched the goings out and comings in of the jewels for twenty or thirty years, to put the cases back into the drawers, and bar and double bar the doors and windows of the dungeons which compose the Jewelkhana.— Once a Week.

How They Dispose of Dead Horses in France.

At Montfaucon they put a dead horse through such a process as makes every part of it valuable. A few days since I paid the noted place a visit, and, with the assistance of a courteous foreman, learned considerable of the inner workings of the establishment? The company running the concern have agents in every village, town and city, whose business it is to buy up all the old horses turned out as no longer fit to work. These are shipped or driven to Montfaucon and then the process commences. When the animal has been killed it is cut up and the choice portions of the flesh are eaten up by the work people of the establishment, and by those who haunt the neighborhood, many of whom are said to be Communists of a very desperate character. The rest of the carcass is sold for the feeding of dogs, cats, pigs and poultry, a portion being also devoted to purposes of manure. The flesh thus disposed of weighs on an average about 350 pounds and sells for from $7.50 to $lO. The skin brings from the tanner about $'2.50. The hoofs are disposed of to a manufacturer of sal ammoniac or similar preparation, or of Parisian blue, or to a comb or toy-maker. The old shoes and nails are worth six cents. The hair of the mane and tail sells for three cents. The tendons are disposed of, either fresh or dried, to glue-makers. The bones are bought by the turners, cutlers, fan-makers and thfe makers of ivory black and sal ammoniac. Of bones the average weight is ninety pounds and the amount realized about sixty cents. The intestines are worth five cents. The blood is most serviceable. The chief purchasers are the sugar-refiners, who use it in manufacturing sugar. The blood is also bought up by the fatteners of poultry, pigeons and turkeys; then again it is sold for manure. When required for manure it is dried, twenty pounds of dried blood, which is the average, being worth forty-five cents. The fat is in demand for making soap, and, when very fine, for “bear’s grease;” also for the grease applied to harness and to shoe-leathenr This fat, when consumed in lamps, gives out more heat than oil, and is therefore preferred by the makers of glass toys, and by enamelers and polishers. One horse has been known to yield sixty pounds of fat, but this was an extreme case. The fat of a horse in fair condition is twelve pounds, but so many lean and sorry jades are taken in that eight pounds may be taken as the average, and at a value of ten cents per pound. Nor does the list end here. Sometimes there is considerable putrid flesh about a dead animal, and how to utilize this matter bothered the French scientists for some time. Finally the problem was solved, and now the putrid flesh is made to teem with life, and to produce food for other living creatures. A pile of pieces of flesh, several inches in height, layer upon layer is arranged, after which it is covered over lightly with hay or straw. In a few hours thousands upon thousands of flies deposit their eggs in this attractive matter, and thus maggots are bred. These are fed to pheasants, and in a smaller degree to domestic fowls. They are also used to fatten sardines. These maggots give, or are supposed to give a game flavor to poultry, and a very high flavor to pheasants. Since I heard the foreman’s story I have made numerous inquires to learn if it was a true one. Thus far I have met with few who believe it, and yet I do not see why Monsieur the foreman should have lied about “a little thing like that.” The maggots thus produced, so I was further informed, are worth thirty-six cents. “ What is the average amount realized on a dead horse?” was my next question. “From sixty to eighty francs” was his immediate answer. Then, after a pause, he informed me of another way they had of making the French horse available. During the early autumn months the rats appear about the premises in tremendous numbers. They would soon overrun the establishment but for a plan long since adopted, and which not only rids the company of th# pests, but returns an income as well. When Montfaucon swarms with rats the carcass of a horse is placed in a room into which the rodents gain access through openings in the floor contrived for the purpose. At night the rats, lured by their keenness of scent, enter the room through these artificial rat-holes by thousands. While they are in the midst of their feast these openings are closed and they are prisoners. Then the slaughter commences. As high as 18,000 have been killed in five weeks in one room. The dead rats are skinned and the skins are sold to Paris furriers for from one to four francs each. The/ are then made up into “four-button kids” and shipped to tlie United States. “ There is among a good many Parisians an idea,” said he. “ that we sell the tongues, kidneys and hearts of horses to the butchers. This is not true.” He then went on to show the absurdity of such a story, besides arguing at some length that the substitution of the equine for the-bovine heart is not attempted, even if it were possible, which he denied. I inclined to the opinion, that the Parisians are right and the foreman wrong in his conclusions. Indeed, I am assured on good authority that the horse’s tongue is used as a substitute for die dried deer’s, a somewhat savory dish, eaten at breakfast time by the bluebloods of the St. Germain quarter. And as for the “beefsteaks” furnished at my restaurant—well; although I used to order one occasionally, I never did think it was a beefsteak. — Paris Cor. N. Y. Times. —Wonderful metamorphosis: To see a sleepy man turn into a bed.

SUBSCRIPTION; s£.oo a Year, in Advance.

It will doubtless always be maintained, and with a good deal of reason, that legal punishments should be enforced without distinction of persons. There must be, it is claimed, the same law for the rich and the poor. This is fundamentally very true, and the truth of the maxim is so generally accepted that in every civilized country capital crimes are equably punished. Whenever there are any distinctions at all, they pertain,to minor offenses. Rich peculators sometimes succeed in escaping the penalty of their misdeeds, not because the law makes a distinction between the rich and the poor thief, but because the peculation has not been the theft direct, has been adroitly managed so as to stand beyond the reach of the law. In all cases of a graver character where the offenses committed are identically of a like nature the penalty is the same, no matter who the person is. But there are a few cases that necessarily involve a question of condition or of antecedents. The rich and the poor forgers suffer alike; but perhaps the rich and the poor drunkards, or the rich and the floor combatants in an assault, are quite likely to have a different sort of penalty dealt out to ■them. But this different justice in appearance may be very far from being different in fact. The noisy vagabond whois sent to tlie penitentiary for ten days probably feels no disgrace, and experiences only a little temporary inconvenience in the penalty; but to the man of customaiy sobriety, who in an exceptional convivial hour disturbs the peace, a single night in the station-house is an intense humiliation, a bitter fact likely to stain and embarrass all his future life. To a man of sensibility and refinement a prison is ten times more formidable than to a man of course instincts and rude habits of life. Everything in this world is much or little by contrast ; a mode of life that to a laborer is comfortable and even agreeable to one of another kind of training would be unendurable;.,the tasks that some find easy others find intolerable; the act that with one man is a matter of custom to another is a bitter humiliation; and hence if the law in the infliction of its penalties makes no distinctions it simply succeeds in making practically tremendous differences. If it be a fundamental maxim that all men should suffer alike for similar offenses, then, in order that they may suffer alike the penalty should be adjusted to the character, rank, and conditions pertaining to the persons under judgment. An inflexible law is sure to be an unjust law. A law incompetent to. recognize the difference between a woman reared tenderly, amid ease and luxury, and a fierce termagant of the gutter, or insensible to the difference between a man of breeding and life-long repute and one hardened to every form of degradation, such a law is actually very unjust, however much it may cany upon the surface a seeming equity. How far it may be practicable to act upon these differences of character and condition, it is not easy to say. In many kinds of offenses it isn certain that it cannot be done; but, as the law’ always falls even at its best with peculiar harshness upon that better class who are not habitual criminals, who have under some mad temptation sacrifled every thing that had made life dear, there need be no fear that these unfortunates will not experience the bitter consequences of their misdoing to the full.— Appletons' Journal. &

The San Francisco Chronicle relates the following incident: About ten o’clock yesterday morning two Chinamen visited a prominent undertakingestablishment in this city, and the spokesman, who talked very good pigeon English, said: “One Chinawoman she muchee die; we want bury her twelve o’clock.” A man was dispatched for the City Physician to make an inspection and give a certificate,- and also to take the measure of the dead woman. The pair wended their way to Brenham place, and in a small room on the third floor, laid out on a mat, was the supposed corpse. The undertaker, thinking only of his business, pulled out his tape-line and asked the doctor to hold one end of it while the size of the coffin required was ascertained. They were a little surprised as they stretched the line over the body to see the woman turn slightly and open her eyes. The Chinaman expressed no surprise, but simply said: “ Oh, she be dead by twelve o’clock.” The doctor, after making a careful examination, concluded that the woman was beyond help, and was on the eve of dissolution, but the undertaker decided that it would be as well to postpone the funeral. Except in the cases of prominent and wealthy Chinamen, whose estates will bear the expense of slavish spread of varnished hog and other funeral meats, the Chinese almost invariably hurry oft their dead to the cemetery before they are fairly cold. Almost any undertaker can furnish experience like this of yesterday, and there can be little doubt that many poor Chinamen are put under the sod before life is extinct. —A case is now on trial in the Circuit Court at Des Moines, lowa, which is based on one of tlje most remarkable occurrences on record. It is a suit brought by a man named Couch vs. The Watson Coal Company, for damages for injuries sustained in a coal mine. Mr. Couch was standing at the bottom of the shaft, which is 135 feet deep. A cage, or elevator, was descending, on which were men and tools. When about thirty feet down an iron blasting drill three "feet long and one and one-fourth inches in diameter, with one end flattened and made sharp, fell from the cage and struck Mr. Crouch, who was in a stooping posture, in the back, near the spinal column, in the region of the kid- , neys, the sharp end entering first. The rod went through his body. The blow prostrated the wounded man, and a comrade pulled the rod from his body. Mr. Couch not only recovered from the effects of the accident, but is able to do as much work as ever. *" —An attempt is to be made to remove the celebrated large grape-vine of Montecito, Santa Barbara County, Cal., to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition.

NO. 2.

Legal Punishments.

In a Hurry for the Funeral.