Fred Fearnot's Day, or The Great Reunion at Avon
CURRENT NEWS
The medicine chest on large steamships is like a closet or cupboard, with a glass door, built in the ship. In this chest the medicine bottles, gilt-labeled, are arranged on shelves that rise one above another in receding tiers. It is practically a well-appointed little drug store. There is supplied with the medicine chest a book, explaining the uses of the medicines, the proper doses, the effects, et cetera.
Rioting in the streets of Tokio, collisions between the police and the populace, many hurt and numerous arrests were the climax to a turbulent day inside and outside the Japanese parliament. The Japanese Diet rejected by 205 votes against 164 a resolution of want of confidence in the Government in connection with the naval graft investigation. A huge mob marched toward the House of Parliament, overturning jinrickishas and attacking several Government officials on their way.
Three hundred dollars for a baseball education is the unique bequest made in the will of the late John R. McVey, a bachelor of Mahoning Township. The money is to be used to provide a baseball education for McVey's favorite nephew, Daniel McVey, Jr, if he shows any inclination to follow that sport as a business. If the boy should decide to make some other field his lifework, then the $300 is to be used by his mother for his benefit in whatever way she may think best for him.
The recent conversion of Carl Norris, a farmer living near Modena, Mo., caused him to pay $6 to Robert Sandlin of Trenton, N. J., which be had owed for eighteen years, and he says he has paid other old debts amounting to $300 since his conversion. Norris and Sandlin are old friends. When Norris visited here recently he told Sandlin of a wrong which he had committed against him years ago. The men estimated the amount at $6, and Sandlin was presented with a check for that amount, including interest to date.
When the Army of the Potomac was in camp in December 1861 Julia Ward Howe visited the headquarters of General George B. McClellan. This gifted woman was impressed by the fact that the "boys in blue" were, all singing "John Brown's Body." Naturally she was distressed by the words of the song and conceived the idea of giving the famous tune a new lyric. She returned to the capital that evening and retired for the night. But the thought of the song drove sleep from her eyes, so she arose and wrote the gem of American verse which bears her name. On her return to Boston James T. Fields, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, suggested the title, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and it was published in the February number of that magazine in 1862.
A French sportsman of Labouheyre, in the Landes Department has just returned from Tangier with a check for $3,000, given to him by a wealthy American resident there, Mr. Theristes, for bringing back a gold ring collar which he found around the neck of a woodcock shot by him near Labouheyre. Mr. Theristes, while traveling in Siberia early in December, came accidentally upon a woodcock with its beak and claws frozen to the ice and consequently imprisoned. He freed the bird, succeeded in restoring animation to it, and for a whim he encircles the neck of the bird with a gold collar, on which he engraved the offer of a reward of $3,000 to any one bring the woodcock back to him. The bird must have flown in a straight line, hardly stopping for rest, for it reached the Landes only a month later, where it met its death.
Contrary to the general belief that the heliograph is an instrument for signaling short distances, it has been used successfully over a distance as great as seventy miles. But this necessarily was on an exceptionally clear day with an intense sunlight. This instrument, which for more than half a century has been found of benefit in army tactics is destined to pass in the near future to oblivion as the result of the invasion of the wireless telegraph. The heliograph is nothing more than a mirror on which the sun's rays are caught and by which they are reflected. The flashes can be thrown in any desired direction and the telegraphic Morse code generally is used. The distance at which flashes from the heliograph and other objects can be discerned by the eye depends on two things--the height and the clearness of the air.
The most conspicuous object in the British Isles is Aft. Snowdon, in Wales, which on a clear day can be distinctly seen from BrayHead, County Wicklow, a distance of no less than eighty-five miles. Snowdon can also be seen from Waterloo, Liverpool, a distance of fifty-two miles. In the Fens, where the ground is perfectly flat for miles, any lofty object can be seen a long way off. Boston Stump, the tower of the fine old church at Boston, Lincolnshire is visible from the Leicestershire Hills, quite forty miles away. From the top of the famous Blackpool tower you can on a clear day catch a glimpse of the Mountain of Snaefell, in the Isle of Man. The distance is a good sixty miles. In Mexico the air is said to be clearer than anywhere else in the world. At any rate, it is the only country where a view extending to 200 miles can be obtained. By climbing to the top of the Sierra Mountains the lonely peak of Mt. Sparta can be seen. It would take four hours by ex- press train to reach it. Mt. Everest, in the Himalayas, is the tallest mountain in the world. From Darjeeling the gigantic cone of Everest is seen rising in snowy grandeur among its mighty neighbors, and any stranger would vow that it was not more than thrifty or forty miles away. As a matter of fact the distance is 107 miles as the crow flies.
