Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1878 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

—About five-and-twenty now histories of the United States, so-culled, have been published within the last three years. - __ —The Baltimore Gazette says of u well-known peripatetic journalist: “His word is so good that it is a bond to the contrary of what he says.” thousand dollars is a moderate price to pay for an honorable immorality, yet this is the sum by which Elihu Yale gave his name to the most noted of American colleges. —Gen. Frank Williams, Postmaster of Stonington, Conn., has held that position or that of Deputy Postmaster there for fifty-two years, except for a short time while he was traveling in Europe. / —Mr. William Wertenbaker, librarian of the University' of Virginia, is eighty years old, and is said to have held that post for fifty-two years, his commission having been signed by Thomas Jefferson. —Mr. Charles E. Stowq, the son of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, has just been licensed to preach by the Congregational Association. He is said to be clever, is a graduate of Harvard, and has studied at Bonn. —An ec<A|ric man in Canton, Conn., who is seventy-five years old. has i ordered that when he dies his horse, J now eighteen old, shall be killed, as the old gentjßß|n says he could not rest in peace if njJßhought the faithful beast was in danger of being abused. —Senator Bruce (colored) is said to have driven out, in his bachelor days, in a coape with a white driver. He is popular with his brother Senators. His wealth was acquired not, like that of most negroes who make money, from the menial occupations, but from planting in Mississippi. — H. Y. Post. —An autopsy on the body of Dr. J. C. Ayer, the millionare pill-vender shows that the brain was hardened, the convolutions shrunken and yellowed, and the coverings thick and clouded, with general congestion of the membranes, and all the signs of advanced general peresis, from which he had long suffered. The bones of the skull were much thinned on the sides, and the arteries were hardened, obstructing the blood circulation; but the brain weighed fifty-three ounces, four or five ounces above the average. —When the officers of the Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., received from an unknown man in Philadelphia a draft for $25,000 on a New York bank, they supposed somebody was imposing upon them. They made inquiries in hpsiness circles in Boston and searched the Philadelphia Directory, but could not find his name. They then ventured to send the draft to the New York bank, and it was cashed at once to their surprise. The giver had never been a student at Andover, and little is known of beyond his name and that he is an MR man. —lt seems that Speaker Randall is one of the largest landowners in the United States, if a correspondent of the World is not mistaken. Writing about the title of the West Virginia land sold in this city a few days ago, he says: “ Mr. Swann, a Massachusetts capitalist, lent large sums of money to Virginia during the Revolutionary War. He received in liquidation of the State’s indebtedness to him a great land grant, which he located in Srmtfrvrcotern Virginia and in Eastern Kentucky. These lands lie partly within the boundaries of McDowell County, and of the original survey all that now remains in the State of West Virginia is an estate of 1,300,000 acres, belonging not to an obscure and unknown person such as the vendee in the late titular sale in New York, who only acquired his assumed title in April of this present year, but to no less distinguished a gentleman than Mr. Samuel J. Randall, the Speaker of the present House of Representatives.”