Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1879 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

—Sir William Jenner, the distinguished English physician, has the whooping-cough. He is sixty-four years old. The London Lancet says that he has left that city “ in order that he may not spread the disease.” —Messrs. Moody and Sankey will hold meetings at Cleveland during October, and then go -to St. Louis for the winter, where Mr. Moody will lease a furnished house, put his children at school and make his home till next summer. —At a church exhibition given at Windsor Locks, in Connecticut, the other day, among the things displayed was a deed of land made in 1568 to Matthew Grant, one of the first sectiers of Windsor Ix>cks, and an ancestor of General Grant’s Mrs. Mary Batchelder, of Burlington Me., eighty years old, one day recently excited local wonder by mounting a load of hay and “pitching ” it on the mow in her barn as actively as a stalwart man of younger years could have done the job. —Some one asked General Toombs the other day in Atlanta, Ga., if he would be a candidate fpr Governor. “No, sir,” was the emphatic reply. “1 have not a single qualification—never made an agricultural speech in my life, and don’t know a single Sun-day-School hymn. —Mr. Henry T. Rodgers, who with Professor Morse established the first telegraph line operated in this country, and who received from the Professor the famous message, “What hath God wrought,” which was sent from Baltimore to Washington, died in Baltimore a few days ago, at the age of sixtynine years. He had been prominently identified with telegraphic interests in this country for many years, and was writing a history of telegraphy at the time of his death. —Owen Wall; the famous negro banjo player of North Carolina, rode, with a party of tourists through the mountains, near Rockingham, the other day, the gayest of the gay. He sat in his saddle Turkish fashion carelessly, picked on his banjo and sang “ Dandy Jim of Caroline,” the chorus of which runs: £dc^lin de eonntree, Of I look in de elans and toun’ 'twaa bo, Jcr as old mAmter told me, O. Just as Owen finished the song, and whi|e the gentlemen were applauding, he fell from the saddle, stone dead.