Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 February 1877 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

—The truth about it is probably given in the Brooklyn Argus. “In the first battle of Bull Run between Mr. Bennett and Mr. May, day before yesterday,” says that paper, “both parties, it appears, threw away their knapsacks in order to facilitate their flight. A farmer picked them up and found in each a long tin tube and a small pouch of Connecticut cured beans.” —lt is a good deal to begin life as an ordinary baby, to grow up to the position of a poor boy, and in a few years, with nothing but shrewdness and pluck as capital, to take the world by the nose and pull it down to you. The dead Commodore takes nothing with him, and that is something of a consolation to cheap people, but he was a conqueror so far as this world goes, and he is entitled to the utmost credit for his great success. — BoChester Democrat. —The late Charles Kingsley, while he held the Professorship of History at Cambridge, in England, in a lecture to a workingmen’s club said that he would advise his audience to study science chiefly, and not history. The more he studied history, he said, the more difficult he found it to attain certainty concerning any fact whatever, whether it occurred or not. In science, however, every fact might be verified; it would occur again ana again in the same circumstances. —A plea for Frank Walworth, the parricide, who is now in the State Insane Asylum at Auburn, is offered by a correspondent of the Albany Timet, who says that “Dr. Gray, Superintendent of the State Lunatic Asylum, is reported to have repeatedly said, and the writer himself has heard him say, that Frank Walworth never should have been sent to prison, and that his eminent legal counsel could have successfully vindicated him had the defence been conducted solely on the hypothesis of insanity.” —Mark Twain looks like anything but a humorist. Two deep wrinkles between his eyebrows mar a face otherwise as fresh and fair as a boy’s. His slight figure, his nervous way of twitching his hands andfstroking his mustache, and the apparent embarrassment of his manners, suggest a modest clerk or an overworked bookkeeper. He rarely laughs, at least openly, although his friends say he constantly grins internafly at the funny .people and situations that force themselves on his busy brain.—Horsford «7nnn.) Letter. —The new medical journal, the Evolution, has a very bloodthirsty, but at the same time a rational, doctrine in regard to dueling. It wants to have everybody killed whenever a. duel is fought. “ One of the best duels we have had in this country,” remarks the cynic, “ was when Alexander Hamilton was killed at Hoboken. It was sad to lose so eminent a statesman, but it put a stop to this most barbarous and retrograde custom. ... Of this brutal pastime Frederick the Great took the correct view. Officers had his permission to fight duels, but the survivor was shot.” —Conductor Henn, who was in charge of the train which went through the Ashtabula bridge, went on duty again the other day. A passenger who was on his train when he went over the new bridge for the first time told a Toledo Commercial reporter that he noticed that as tiie train neared the bridge Henn seemed very much agitated. The horrors of that awful night cf terrors seemed to come over him so completely that the great drops of perspiration rolled down his face, and he grasped the seat nervously for support. When the train passed off the biiilgc on to terra Jirma be ex claimed, “ Thank God I’ m <> T e r » 811(1 now I’m not afraid to go over it a thousand times.”