Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1879 — INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS. [ARTICLE]

INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS.

—Dennis Dixon and Sank Reek bought a pint of whisky, on Christmas, at Georgetown, Va. After drinking, both became weak in the limbs and sick at the stomach, and sat on the roadside until a teamster brought them to that place. Dixon was taken to a house, and while sitting by a stove, fell forward dead. The Coroner’s Jury rendered a verdict of death from exposure and bad whisky. —ln the obituary column of the Philadelphia Ledger is the following mysterious bit of poetry in connection with the announcement of the death of George Reckard, aged seventy-nine years: I beard my father moan When ho waa set at my door to die. I took him in and uHcd him well Till Jeans called him home. This dreadful deed was surely done. Their dying hour will oome; The Judge above has seen it all, Their suffering time wiU oome. —A curious transaction, which occurred at the Detroit Opera -House a month ago, has just leaked* out. A young lady who is blessed with a fine head of hair, and generally wears it braided at full length, one night attended the opera, and, on returning home, discovered, to her amazement, that during the performance some bold depredator had nicely clipped a full half of the appendage without her knowledge. —A Mrs. Drake, of Muhlenburg County, Ky„ has an apple which has been in existence since the Revolutionary War. A soldier received the apple from his betrothed just as he left to join the army of Washington; kept it during the whole war; returned after the surrender of Yorktown and married the fair giver. The apple is sacredly preserved in the family. It is dry and shrivelled, nothing remaining but the woody fiber.

—A young man residing in Bedford, Va., lately had a narrow escape from a most horrible death. He baa lost his way in the blue Ridge, and, night approaching, he climbed a large chestnut tree, fearing to sleep on tne ground, but in crawling into the hollow top, where it had been broken by the wind, the tree proved to be a mere hollow shell, ana he fell forty feet into its depths. A small knothole supplied the prison with air, and, by picking at the wood, the captive got a hole big enough to let him out just before dark the next night. —Hamlet refrained from killing his mother’s husband while the latter was on his knees, but Mrs. John S. Caldwell, of South By field, ddass., had no such scruples when she decapitated her husband with an ax. Mr. Caldwell was kneeling at a chair, offering his morning devotions, the only other person in tne house being his sister-in-law, who was in the same devout posture, when Mrs. Caldwell stealthily entered the room, and, snatching up an ax, which her husband had brought into the room the night before, dealt him a blow on the back of his neck, which nearly severed his head from his body. Death was instantaneous, and the soul of the suppliant followed the half-ut-tered prayer to the other world. The terrible deed done, the woman went to a neighbor's house and told him to go over, as she had struck her husband and might have killed him. He had threatened, she said, to kill her.

—William Thomas, who keeps a public house on the Coney Island boulevard, has had two bears chained near his place. The male has been known as very ugly, and children have been cautioned against going near him. The she-bear was quite docile. The other afternoon Peter titretch, a boy twelve years old, and a younger brother left home on an errand and stopped in front of the bears to watch some doves. Peter was a little closer to the male bear than he thought, and the animal reached out with his paw and caught him by the calf of the leg, pulled him to him, and terribly lacerated him. He seized the boy with his teeth and cut the jugular vein at the very first bite. He cut the skull open with his claws, and shockingly mutilated him in other parts of the body. It is that the boy was dead within one minute after the first attack—A passing farmer jumped from his wagon and attacked the bear with a pitchfork, but could make no impression. The animal was finally shot by a policeman— N. Y. Telegram.