Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1898 — WASHINGTON. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON.

The national debt increased $12,589,771 during Jnminry. Secretary of Agriculture Wilson will soon make a trip to Florida to investigate tobacco growing. He thinks Florida may raise as good tobacco as Cuba. Encouraged by the excellent effect of the visit of the battle ship Maine to Havana the administration has determined to send anothof man-of-war upon a friendly visit to the smaller Cuban ports. The vessel selected is the cruiser Montgomery, which is now taking on board a supply of coal at Key West. In addition to this the armored cruiser* Brooklyn, now at the Brooklyn navy yard, will leave in a few days for a cruise in the West Indies. She will not touch Cuba. Her itinerary requires her to first visit St. Thomas, thence go to Santa Cruz, Curacoa, La Guayra and Aspinwall. Torts in Cuba will form only a feature in the itinerary of the Montgomery, ns it is proposed to have her call at several other points in the West Indies. The Montgomery’s mission, like that of the Maine to Havana, is purely friendly in character. For a few hours it was thought that the suicidal mania which has caused a number of attempts at self-destruction in Washington for the past several weeks might result in the loss of lives of Walter Taylor. a clerk in the Treasury Department, and his pretty 20-yeur-old daughter Lucy. Miss Taylor bus been in ill-health for some time past, and her illness assumed a suicidal form. She was with difficulty persuaded to retire to her room and about 1 o’clock in the morning, after a violent struggle with her parents, who tried to hold iier, plunged through the window of her home and fell into a snowbank in the front yard. She then ran, terribly cut and bruised, through tlie streets, and after a half hour’s search was found in a snowbank almost nude by a policeman. She was taken home, and it was then found that duriug her absence her father had hanged himself by a rope attached to the boiler of a stove. He was cut down and removed to the hospital unconscious. Latest ndviees iudieute that neither will die.