Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1878 — INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS. [ARTICLE]

INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS.

—At Squirrel Island, near Augusta, Me., a few days ago, a young boy belonging to the town inveigled a lad, named Butterfield, into an out-house, compelled him to strip, and then beat him most unmercifully, in revenge for some real or fancied insult. The boy was believed to be fatally hurt. —At Pittsburgh, the other day, as Mr. Marshall Jones was standing in the wheel-pit in the machinery hall of the Exposition, aiding to lower an immense fly-wheel to its place, the chain which held it broke, and the wheel fell, and, in its descent, struck Mr. Jones on the neck and severed his head from his body as cleanly as it could have been done by a surgeon, —Quite an excitement was created at Readviile, Mass., by the mysterious sickness of several of the operatives in a curled-hair factory, two years ago, when three persons are said to have died from a painful disease, thought to be blood-poisoning from the hair of diseased animals, principally Siberian horses, inanv of which die from a peculiar malady. A few days ago anothj er operative died, and another was lying dangerously sick, both evidently cases of the disease of two years ago. —Gen. John F. Taliaferro, once a prominent Virginia politician, but of late years an inmate of the lunatic Asylum at Williamsburg, Va., got into a dispute a few days ago with Newton Cunningham, a fellow-patient, about a flying-machine upon which the latter had been at work for nine years and lost his money and his mind. The General contended that it would never fly, and Cunningham seized a heavy spoke from one of the wheels of the flyingmachine and struck Gen. Taliaferro a fearful blow on the skull, smashing it in and killing him instantly. The General was eighty years old. —Another instance of youthful precocity in crime occurred in East Cambridge, Mass., the other afternoon, when Johnny Lane, thirteen years old, stabbed and instantly killed his brother Timothy, a lad of fifteen. The boys had lately purchased a rabbit, and were amusing themselves with it when the fatal quarrel occurred. Two carpenters, at work in a neighboring house, observed the older boy sink down close to the fence, back of which the rabbit’s box was. His face was dreadfully pale, and black clotted bldod was oozing from his breast arid running over his scanty clothing. In answer to the shouted inquiry of the carpenters, the wounded boy replied that his brother had stabbed him. The youthful murderer had in the meantime run away. The tragedy was soon known throughout the neighborhood, and hundreds of curious spectators thronged around the body as it lay upon the grass awaiting the arrival Of the medical examiner. The youthftil murderer was tracked to Boston, and arrested in the house of an aunt, where he had taken refuge. The real cause of the tragedy will probably never be known.