Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 August 1879 — INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS. [ARTICLE]

INCIDENTS AND ACCIDENTS.

—An eighteen-months-old baby was eaten up by an alligatftr near Tampa, Fla., recently. —A Nevada mule was killed, and carefully dissected because he had swallowed ten twcnty-dollar bills. —A little girl has just died at Newport! 11. 1., from injuries received in playing snap-the-whip at a Sundayschool picnic. * —Two negro boys had a .butting match in Greenville, N. C., the other day, and one of them butted the other into eternity. —A little girl at Springfield, Mass., was so frightened by a dog which had been set upon her that she went into convulsions and died. —A man in Utica, N. Y., cut off his wife’s hair close to the scalp because she had trimmed her little girl’s hair short for the hot weather. —Two aged colored women fought in the Newport Almshouse, and it transpired that sixty years before they had quarreled about a lover so bitterly that, on meeting, their animosity was as strong as ever. « —A woman at Burlington, Vt., was fatally poisoned while washing a pair of trousers which a man had worn, while applying Paris green to his potato vines, the poison taking effect through a cut in her hand. —A young man died in Bingham - ton, N. Y., lately from the effects of swallowing a silver half-dollar about three weeks before. He was tossing the coin in the air and catching it in his mouth, to amuse a child, when it lodged in his throat and passed into his stomach. —Some excitement was occasioned at Baltimore, on a recent Sunday, by the fitful noises of a steam-whistle. The noise was very mysterious, as the factories were all closed for the day, and the fires were extinguished. The sound was finally traced to a certain sawmill, and then the mystery was solved. Two cats were disporting about the wire leading to the whistlevalve, and as they occasionally dragged against it the confined air in the pipe escaped, and made the noise.

—I have always supposed that the story that cats were addicted to the habit of sucking the breath of persons while sleeping, where they could get access to the apartment, was nothing but a nursery fiction with which to frighten children from tne practice of taking pet cats to bed with them; but a case in point has just come under my notice, with which I thought it would be well to acquaint your readers, to guard them against a similar occurrence. A young lady of my acquaintance, residing in Bedford avenue, Brooklyn, was awakened last week during the night in an almost exhausted and strangling condition, with just sufficient consciousness to throw from hpr breast a cat whose mouth was thrust far into hers. She had scarcely strength to call for help, and has since been very ill from prostration and ulcerated sore throat. For several mornings previous she had awakened with very peculiar sensations about the throat and chest. The cat was a strange one, as none is kept about the house, and must have gained access to the apartment through a window (which opens on a balcony) near the bed.— Cor. N. Y. Tribune.