Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1878 — PERSONAL AND LITERART. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERART.

—Senator Don Cameron’s eldest daughter will have charge of her five brothers and sisters at Harrisburgh, and bis bride will have sole possession of the Senator’s house in Washington. —Edwin Booth has refused to play at Washington since Lincoln’s murder by his brother John Wilkes; hence Capitolian folk desirous of seeing the great actor have to go to Baltimore whenever he has an engagement there. —Probably the smallest paper in the country, if not in the work!, is published at Orlando, Fla. Its size is two and a half by three inches, and it claims a circulation of 1,200. It is printed monthly, and its name is the Florida Mite. —Caleb Cushing took lessons in French from an experienced teacher when he was on the Continent at the time of the Geneva Arbitration, though he hail spoken French fluently for forty years; there were “certain ielicities” of speech, he said, that ho had never acquired. —Gen. Grant speaks no foreign language, so his intercourse with distinguisned foreigners is generally confined to a shake of the hand and a smile. He is ready in this fashion to make the acquaintance of all persons, Princes or peasants, and he treats all who are introduced to him with impartial urbanity.—Chicago Tribune. —President Hayes recently received the following letter from a man in Vermont: "Desiring to see Washington to the best advantage, I write to ask you if I can make my headquarters with you at the Executive Mansion, as I have a prejudice against stopping at hotels, and the private boarding-houses are not quite up to my standard of living.” —Charlotte Cushman’s grave was recently pointed out to a reverent pilgrim by a workman in the cemetery, who said: “ She was considerable of a woman for a play-actress.” It ison the eastern summit of the principal hill in Mount Auburn, within sight of the Boston and the Cambridge she so dearly loved. Only a small white stone, bearing her name, marks the grave. —You can’t most always tell sometimes often how things are going to San out. Ex-Solicitor-Gen. Baker, of Quebec, at the recent provincial election, prepared for a grand jubilation over liis certain return; the teams for the triumphal procession were hitched up, the bonfire was built, and the torches were ready. At five o’clock he was 168 ahead, and everything... was. lovely; at 6:3(ysome back districts were heard from and his majority came down to fifty; at 7:30 came the dispatch: "Seventeen behind; don’t illuminate.” They didn’t.

—Edison got the hint of his phonograph—so, at least, they say—from Ben Butler, who, examining a telephone, said to him, “ Now you must make something to record these sounds.” Some one said to the great inventor, who has taken out 150 patents, with many back districts of his brain yet to hear from, “ I wonder if you couldn’t talk a hole through a board.” “Of course I could,” was the reply, and he showed how the point of a phonograph could be made to act upon a small ratchet-wheel, which by a system of cogs would turn the gimlet and drive it through the board! —When Ben: Perley Poore, the compiler of the Congressional Directory, callqd on John Morrissey for a short sketch of his life, and asked what his profession was, the newly-elected Congressman said, with some bitterness, “Well, I suppose you had better put me down as a faro-dealer.” “Oh, you don’t mean it," said Maj. Poore. “ Can’t you give me some other occupation?” “Yes, of course I can,” replied Morrissey. “ Give me credit for my old trade if you will; call me an iron-molder, for that’s what I am if I’m anything.” And he appears in the Directory as an iron-molaer.