Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 October 1875 — BREVITIES. [ARTICLE]

BREVITIES.

Lots of trouble —Lots which are mortgaged. Neal Dow says that taxes should be paid in installments. In war times people kill each other ; in hard times they kill themselves. Florida papers arc fearful that the alligator crop may be short this fall. One-fourtii of the total valuation of the real estate of New York city is under mortgage. Begin to buy oxen and learn which is “ gee” and “ haw”; the epizootic is coming again. Every Gallic man from twenty to forty is liable by the new laws to serve in the French army. A Gilmer County (Ga.) man found eight hundred and odd dollars in an old log the other day. The devil still finds work for idle hands to do, and the wages of sin have not been reduced. Great Britain counts on the importation ot 88,000,000 bushels of wheat this year to keep tire wolf from the door. In some parts of Texas the people are complaining because their cotton crops are so large they cannot gather them! A one-legged “beggar” was picked up drunk in the streets of Sacramento, and found to have sl7l in his pockets. The Clinton (W. Va.) salt furnace was sold at trustee’s sale the other day for SII,OOO. It cost $407,000 when built in 1867-’B. Two miles south of Gilroy, Cal., tobacco grows six feet high with leaves; thirty inches in length and 2,000 pounds to the acre. Capt. Eads’ jetties, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, suffered but little by the recent great storm in the Gulf of Mexico. The census of Kansas, just completed, shows a loss of population in twenty-three counties in the State. The grasshoppers probably did it. There are eight completed Bessemer steel establishments in the country, and, according to tire Iron Age, “every one is running to its full capacity and is full of orders.” A dog in Peru, Ind., has the fever and ague. He shakes, tail and all, every day •at ten o’clock. He takes an occasional

bark, but Peril-vian bark seems to do him no good. In dredging Buffalo harbor the other day they found a stone war-club, and now they are digging down for the chap who used to balance it on his thumb and cry for gore. If you have a boy, name him William. Statisticians say that there are now only 2,000,000 “ Williams” in tlie United States, without counting the little “ Willies.” There is nothing a man will look at more frequently, and resolve to do every time he looks at it, than to clean up the cellar, and yet invariably leave it for his wife to do. Henry Swan, of Otsego, N. Y., called his wife to him as he and said: “Mary Jane, when you toed the hogs to-' morrow night you’ll be the widow Swan!’ And she was. M. Henri Rochefort was evidently not born to be drowned. He swam away from his prison and now, having been capsized on the Lake of Geneva, he easily saved his life. A Pennsylvania paper is constrained to remark: “ A good many of tlie chickens that come to this market look as though they had been hatched out of egg-plants and then allowed to wither.” The city of Brooklyn has spent an average of $8,400,000 per annum for the past ten years. The Argus thinks there is something, wrong, and it does look as if there were screws loose somewhere. The largest Jobster which lias been brought into the Boston market for fifteen years was caught at Eastport, Me., the other day. It measured three feet five inches in length and weighed nineteen pounds. Dr. Honeyman, an Acadian naturalist, obtained, a number of army-worms and kept them under a glass case to note their development. They turned into brown moths, each having tw r o white spots on the back. The Italian Senate is about to sit in judgment on one of its member, Signor Satriano, a Neapolitan, who borrowed $4,000 from a lady and then made out that he repaid her by forging her name to a receipt.: —~ They arrest and tine people who throw banana and orange peel on the sidewalks in Augusta, Ga. Such measures are necessary, considering the cheapness of these fruits "there; otherwise Augusta would be rapidly depopulated. —The other everiing, when Harper’s train was approaching Lockland, it—parted in the middle and the bell-rope snapped off like a thread, the end of it striking an old lady from Jasper on her bonnet and setting her nerves to play. “What on earth’s the matter ?” she exclaimed. “Oh, the train’s bfoke in two,” replied a gentleman who sat in the next seat. “Ugli! I should say so,” the old lady said, looking at the broken bell-cord. “ Did they s’pose such a nasty, trifling little string like that would hold the train together!” —Dayton Democrat. —Two Minneapolis girls walked from Minneapolis to St. Paul, a distance of eleven and a half miles, in two hours and a half, —The corpses of dead letters are resurrected into clean paper and are worth $5,000 per annum for that purpose. —When is a literary work like smoke ? When it rises in volumes.

—Belleville, Ohio, has a champion hunter to boast of. His name is George Bittenbanner. He does not sport a $l6O breecli-loading gun, warranted to kill a prairie chicken at the distance of 200 yards, but, on the contrary, he is contented with an old flint-lock musket that does not look to be worth. $2.50. Neither does George put on Style in a fancy turn-out, but drives a dilapidated old mare to a little rickety wagon that only holds together by the force of habit; and, strange to say, his favorite hunting-dog is a common' cur that was brought up about town and never saw a prairie chicken until he was five years old. But Bittenbanner understands the nature of his game and has made a study of its habits, and knows when and where it can be found in the greatest abundance, and about four p. m. he may be seen with his strange accoutrements heading for the country, and about nine o’clock ms is almost sure to return with frbm fifty to sixty roasting ears and half a dozen fine melons lying snug in the bottom of his little wagon. A gentleman in London has sued , a neighbor for keeping a bantam cock that crowed in the morn at four o’clock so habitually and vigorously that the recovery of his wife, who was in delicate health, was retarded by tlie noise. The defendant submitted that he was strictly within his legal rights in keeping fowls, and that he could not prevent the plumed biped from chanting his sweet song. The Judge suggested to the defendant the propriety of abating the nuisance.