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

VARIETY AND HUMOR.

—There is no luck like p-luck. —The tax which presses most heavily on school-boys—Syn-tax. —The potato-rot. is doing considerable damage in Western New York. —Fire is said to he a dissipated element, because it goes out almost every night. —"Goldsmith Maid” hates to acknowledge it, hut she has reached the 20th year of her age. —The Bushes, quite an aristocratic family, are out in fall style, with various shades of red and yellow. —Now the heart of the average woman dilates with pride as she fondly strokes the fur of her seal skin sacque. —lt is said that a human being has 7,000,000 of pores through which perspiration and exhausted particles ot the system escape. We are all pore creatures. —“Do they ring two bells for school ?” said a father to his ten-year-old daughter, who attends the High-School. “ No, pa, they ring one hell twice," she replied. —King Kalakaua is sick, and because a school of red lisli came into the hay of Honolulu lately the superstitious natives believe that their King must die. —The few people of Florida who have been graciously' saved oversummdP are beginning to bestir themselves as cool weather comes on, and invite all the rest of the world to come down there and live. —Under the Constitution of Missouri every city of 100,000 inhabitants is entitled to the right of self-government. St. Louis is tlie only city in the State that can avail itself of the provision. —Three months ago the Montana papers would have stated that a horse-dealer had been invited to a hempen-necktie sociable ; now they say that the citizens have put a pull-back cravat on him. —The Marietta (Ga.) Jturnal was told by a gentleman the other day that human spittle was as deadly to poisonous snakes as their bites were deadly to man. He says while picking up a bundle of straw and trash under his arm, while cleaning a field, a ground rattlesnake, four feetlong, crawled out from it and fell to the ground at his feet. He at once placed his heel upon the head of the snake and spit in its mouth. Shortly afterward the showed symptoms of inactivity and sickness, and he picked it up by its talk and carried it to t\e house and showed it to his wife, telling her he had spit in its mouth and that it was poisoned. At the expiration of fifteen minutes the snake was dead. To further experiment he came across a blowing adder (snake), which ejected from its mouth a yellowish liquid. He caught it and spit in its mouth and it died. He caught another blowing audit refused to open its mouth. Hespitupona stick and rubbed the spittle upon the adder’s nose and it died. Afterward he came across a black-snake, regarded as not poisonous, and he caught it and spit in its mouth. Instead of the spittle killing the black-snake, as it did the poisonous reptiles, it only made it stupidly sick, from which it recovered. This conclusively shows that poisonous snakes have as mnch to fear from the spittle of man as man has to fear from their bites.