Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1879 — The Casual Person. [ARTICLE]

The Casual Person.

The casual person is so plainly his own enemy that it is really not worth while for other people to behave unkindly to him. Perhaps he pleases people by the very noise and movement of his crowded life, in which he* is always trying to do everything with inadequate instruments. To him existence is a sort of Crusoe’s island, and he is constantly exerting an ingenuity as great as Crusoe’s in doing things in the wrong, but in what seems to him the easy, way. If anything in his house is broken, he does not send for the carpenter; it is not worth while; he mends it himself in a manner which, he says, *' will do well enough.” If a gas-pipe is cut (a thing which sometimes happens when the casual man is addicted to pistol-practice in his bedroom), he stops the hole with a piece of soap and goes away and forgets all about the matter. If he cuts himself in Shaving, he hastily tears a convenient shred of blotting-paper, a rough-and-ready styptic, out of the first writing-case that comes to hand. He smokes, but, he. never has any matches, and is often almost,reduced to the primitive method of rubbing two sticks together to get a light. One has seen him working away at a cigarette with a burning-glass. It is dreadful to have him in a room where there are books, for he regards flyleaves as pipe-lights in a state of Nature; he has no regard for title-pages, andjwith the tissue-naper which guards engravings he rolls up tobacco and makes cigarettes. He is disliked in houses where decorative arms, swords and creeses are kept on the walls; for he draws a dagger to sharpen his pencil, and, violating the old saw, will poke the fire with a sword. In his character of Crusoe he enjoys doing things for himself. He mends any torn garments with pins, and fancies that all is well. He has been seen trying to wind up the hall clock when the key is lost, with a button-hook. He is often put to it sadly by his habit of losing keys, and climbs over the wall into nis own house like a thief and a robber. If the sash-ropes of his windows are broken, he keeps them open with the first prop that comes to hand, often a hair-brush, sometimes a lexicon. When his curtain-rings do notrun smoothly (and in his house nothing runs smoothly), he climbs on a chair and pushes them with a poker.—Saturday Review. —The Captain of the Tenasserim, a British ship, reported on his arrival at Liverpool irom India that during the voyage a negro steward, named Sherrington, seized an ax and with it instantly killed the chief officer and an apprentice. The murderer then leaped E verboard and was devoured by sharks i the presence of the horrified crew.