Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 December 1877 — A Century of Danish History. [ARTICLE]

A Century of Danish History.

A well-authenticated case of longevity'is reported from Copenhagen. On Wednesday, Nov. 21, there died in that town, at the age of one hundred and two years eleven months eleven days, a Mr. Johan Joseph Ronge, a glass-deal-er and glasscutter by trade, the oldest citizen of Copenhagen. He was born on the 10th of December, 1774, not early enough to have seen Queen Caroline Mathilde before she was carried to Cronborg Castle and sent an exile to Celle, but still at a time when as a boy he could from eye-witnesses hear the report of the public execution of that Queen’s unhappy favorite, the once allpowerful Minister Struensce. He was a youth of over eighteen when Louis XVI. was beheaded, a man of forty at the time of Waterloo and the downfall of Napoleon I. Till he was 100 years old Mr. Ronge managed his business himself, and attended in his shop, though he had 'been compelled some years earlier to give up working at the glass-cutter’s wheel. On the 11)th of December, 1874, he received from the King a decoration, not as a reward for living so long, but as an acknowledgment of an 'active and honorable life of no common extent. Even after haying completed his century, the old man could be seen every day sitting at the same table in one of the most frequented cases of Copenhagen, sipping his tumbler of toddy and glancing at the papers, withered and wrinkled as an over-kept winter apple, but withal, hale and healthy, with his mental powers unimpaired, and perfectly able to help himself, even to walk without a stick. His death, which was sudden at the last, was occasioned, not by any decline of strength,’but by a serere cold.— London Timts,