FREELAXD TRIBUKE. lISTA 121 > 18*8 PUBLISHED EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND FRIDAY, BY TUB IRIEUNE PRINTING COMPANY. Limited OFFICE; MAIN STREET ABOVE CENTRE. LOHU DISTANCE TELEPHONE. SniSCRIPTIOX It ATE* Fit EEL AND.— J'heTßinuNE is delivered by curriers to subscribers in Frocluud at the rate of I-Uj cents per month, payable every two months or slsoa year, payable iu advance- The TRIBUNE may bo ordered direct form the carriers or from the office, e.'ompluints of lrr. oular or tardy delivery service will re ceive prompt attention. BY MAIL —The TRIBUNE is sent to out-of town subscribers for $1.51 a year, payable ia advance; pro rata terms for shorter periods. The data when the subscription expires is oil the address label of caoh paper. Prompt re newals must bo made at the expiration, other wise the subscription will bo discontinued. Entered at the Postoftlco at Freeland. Pa., as Second-Class Matter. Make all money orders, c'ierks etc. ,p"y hit to the Tribune 1* Tinting Company, Limited. A vaudeville (rust hai just been or ganized, but there is little reason to hope that it will throw out any of the old jokes. •Tames Defoe's death In London re moves the last male descendant of Daniel Defoe. "Robinson Crusoe" is now a classic unlinked with the pres ent. If fish Is a brain food then the resi dents along tlie Nile should not be short on brains. Not only are fish plentiful in that river, but there are 2200 varieties. England's coal supply, it is esti mated, will be gone In 10G0. But a mnjorl*"7 ot * the present generation of Englishmen will be keeping warm enough about that time not to worry over the fact. Australia does not propose that her light shall bo hid under a bushel. The lighthouse at Sydney is served by elec tricity. with 180,000 candle power, and the light itself can be seen for fifty miles at sea. Mr. Carnegie gave away $3,000,000 Inst year, and a large number of peo ple would be tickled half to death if his profits should not be sufficient to make him feel like giving away more than <sbout thirty cents during the present year. "Could France Invade England?" is the title of a ponderous article In one of the newspapers. "I see," said Wel lington to one of his Irish officers at tlie battle of Waterloo, "that some of the French broke into your lines." "Yes," answered the Irishman, "but you never saw them get out." "The boy without a playground is the father of the ma" without a job," says Mr. Joseph Lee, of Boston. It is a notable saying—almost as good as Wellington's about Waterloo and the Eton hoys. The playground is the best possible kindergarten for Hie rough and-tumble scramble of making a liv i' . -the little Waterloo of individual existence. \\ hat explorer of royal blood ever d.splayed more Indomitable energy and dc; < rminatlon than the Italian Duke of the Abruzzi? Not satisfied with the fame already won in his effort to reach the North Pole, he is now fired with seal for discovery in the cold Annrc tic, and has already begun his prepara tions for a great expedition to the south two years hence. That there Is more smallpox in the country than there has been for forty years shows that it is less important to determine whence it comes than to take vigorous measures for its extirpa tion. The means of prevention—lsola tion and restriction—should be prompt ly and thoro lghly resorted to every where until it is finally wiped out, as serts the Pittsburg Dispatch. The information is vouchsafed by a firm of fashionable tailors in London that "every practical cutter and tailor Who has hud anything to do with the clergy all agree that they are particu lar about their clothes." It is not un likely that a well-cut coat might in spire a better sermon than a suit of rusty black. The consciousness of being well groomed stimulates to ac tivity some of the highest faculties of the mind. In consequence of the insufficiency o| coaling stations for the Russian men-of war the ministry of marine is having a large steamer constructed for supply ing the squadrons with coal. A first payment of £50.000 lias been made on account of the building of the vc?s;l, which is tj have a displacement of 7,20 c tons, Thirty thousand people-in the United States make their living from the grow ing silk industry. TRIUMPH. My greatest triumph ha.s been won— -1 ne'er shall do a fairer thing! My rival prospered yesterday; I heard of it and didn't siiuii Him, fearing smiles that he might bring, But from my heart 1 put away The jealousy that had begun To spring up there, and tried to see The good in that which he had done— To feel that all was earned which ho Had gained—and 1 succeeded, too! 1 saw how that in passing ine He had but won what was his due— -1 choked down Hate and strove anew! —S. E. Kiser, in the Chicago Times lierald. J THE PROMOTION of" j J PATROLMAN WAGNER. J 9 A TRUE STOUT. if A BY KAY ST A WARD BAKER. A f 9 Wagner was so new to brass but tons that he still ran to fires. There are those In the police who do not run after one year's experience; Wagner, being ambitious, had been running nearly three years, and nothing had happened. Wagner is a gymnast as well as a policeman, and he is as proud of his big right arm—it feels like a new hemp hawser —as he is of his drab helmet. On a night in April, some years ago, Wagner was patrolling his beat in Lexington avenue. New York, up as far as Seventy-fourth street and back again to Sixty-sixth street, a leisurely tramp of half a mile,, although dull from being familiar. A few minutes after 2 o'clock in the morning, as Wagner records in his little book, ho saw a fire engine coming up the ave nue with horses in full gallop. Iu the daytime a fire engine is an incident; at night it is an event. This engine turned into Sixty-ninth street and raced to the eastward. An engine in full steam leaves be hind a broad, bright pathway of burning cinders. Wagner followed this path, and it led him straight to the edge of th - park. Smoke was al ready rising in a dim, gray cloud above a brownstono bouse. It needed a keen eye at that hour of the night, to see the building was on fire. In the middle of the street two scantily clad men were gesticulating oddly and pointing upward. On a narrow ledge that ran just below a fourth-story window stood a girl in a white wrapper. She was crouching, with her hands feeling out along the smooth brick wall and over the edge of the steep mansard roof. She had crept from the open window, and the smoke was now reaching out behind her along the wall. It was about 50 feet down to the stone steps of the areaway, and the ledge was not as wide as a man's two hands. As Wagner came up, he saw the girl look down as if intending to jump. "Wait!" he shouted. "I'll help you!" Then he ran up the steps of the ad joining building, and when the door was opened he dashed up four flights of stairs and ran into a front room. The window was already open. Two men were leaning out and holding the end of a knotted sheet. The ledge ran only the width of the burning build ing; consequently, although the girl was near the end of it, she was still separated from the men by more than five feet of bare brick wall; and she was two feet below them. They were dangling the sheet ineffectually in her direction and shouting: "Take hold! take hold!" The girl made feeble passes at the sheet, but she could not catch it; if she had caught it. they would, with the best possible intentions, have dragged her from the lodge, and she would have been dashed to death on the flagging below. She was silent and all but dazed. Wagner leaned out of the window, his right hand clutching the casing and his left extended in her direction. He called to her to jump. She glanced down at the gathering crowd in the street, and clutched again at the smooth wall. Wagner knew that the frantic advice of the men below, the hissing of the engines and ail the other din of the fire were fast unnerving her. Fitzgerald, a fireman, now came up the stairs two stops at a time. When Wagner saw him he said, "Hold on to my leg." Then ho straddled the sill, with his right leg in and his left one out. Fitz gerald and one of the citizens grasped his ankle and braced their feet against the sill. Then Wagner leaned forward, with his left, foot pushing on the wall below the window until he stood straight out in mid-air as stiff and firm as the hickory shaft of a hoisting crane. He did not once look below lilm, or count on the chances of falling. He was facing the girl; slowly he swung to ward her. "Here, reach out!" ho shouted. Rut nh" did not hear him. She was trying blindly to turn on the ledge, feeling that escape In this direction was cut off. She was groping for the window that she had come through, not knowing that the room was now in flames from floor to ceiling. Just as Hho faced about, a sudden gush of fire drove the glass outward from the sash es and <hot half a hundred feet in air. The girl shrank back before the heat, looked down, wavered, and then de liberately stepped from the ledge. Her hands were thrown out above her, and those below turned away in hor ror. But. Wagner had thrown himself violently forward. As the girl shot ; past him ho grasped her arm near the elbow with his right hand. At tho sudden checking of the fall her right arm slipped swiftly through his fin gers, Irit at her wrist he held her with a grip of steel. His own body was bene heavily downward; his leg, held by the two men within the win dow, was violently wrenched over on tho sharp stone sill and drawn down with a snap as the girl's body was stopped short in its flight at the length of his arm. And there the two hung, the man holding by one leg, with his head down and his back to the wall, and the girl dangling by one hand far below him. She was a dead weight of 130 pounds. For a moment Wagner did not move; what with tho pain in his leg, the wrench of his arm and the blood in his head, he was convinced that he must let her fall. But his wavering lasted only a second. By sheer strength he lifted her up until he could grasp her arm with his left hand. And then again he lifted, every straining lurch cutting into the leg which Fitzgerald and the citizen still hold with grim determination. The girl was limn and scantily clothed; ho could not get a firm hold, and yet and by sheer strength he succeeded in getting his hands under her arms. Then again he lifted, pushing her up across his body, until one of the men above, reaching down, could grasp her arm. Then they pulled her in, unconscious and more dead than alive. After that, they lifted Wagner and drew him across the sill. They thought his leg was broken, but after a moment Wagner took the girl in his arms and carried hcv down four flights of stairs to the ambulance. When Wagner reported for duty the next evening, the sergeant read an order from the chief of police requir ing his immediate presence at head quarters. Wagner went with tremb ling not yet having awakened to his deed. The secretary of police seemed to know him and greeted him familiar ly: so did the men of the central de tail. Wagner thought it odd. At the midnight roll-call, the chief brought Wagner out and shook him by the hand before them all. Then he con ferred upon him the two gold chev rons of a roundsman. Never before in the department had courage won promotion so promptly.—Youth's Com panion. fi WOMAN'S FXPEDIENT. Clever Scheme lo Kimble s Prigonor to Cut His Way Out of .Jail. "Whenever I see that particular brand of canned peaches," said a New Orleans grocer, indicating a row of tins 011 Uie top shelf, "I am reminded of something very queer that hap pened here several years ago. One day in the summer of '96, if I remem bcr rightly, a refined looking woman of about 30, dressed in deep mourn ing. came into the store and bought a couple of cans of California peaches of tho brand I have just pointed out. She had a cab and took them with her, and I thought no more of the incident until she returned next day, carrying the tins in her hand. "I have a sick brother at ," she said, naming a small town in Alabama, and was in tending to send him these peaches, with a bundle of other things, yester day. But, on second thought, I be lieve I will buy a few more delicacies and get you to ship them separately. There was nothing peculiar about the request and I assured her I would be glad to attend to the matter. She or dered four or five dollars' worth of different articles—jellies, olives, mar malade and so on—paid the bill and gave me her-brother's name, directing the things to be sent to him in care of captain somebody or other, at tho Alabama town which she mentioned before. As soon as she left, I got out a box and began to pack up the con signment; but as soon as 1 came' to the poach"s 1 noticed that t he two cans which she had returned were both slightly 'blown,' as wo call it in the trade. In other words, the tops bulg ed outward a trifle, indicating that a little fermentation had been going on. Not wishing to send a sick man any thing but the best, I set them aside and put in two fresh cans from the shelf. The box was shipped by the first express. "Nearly six months after this epi sode," continued the grocer, with twinkling eyes, "we were cleaning out our old stock and ran across those two cans of peache3. I picked up one of them carelessly, and, my hand be ing wet, a piece of the label came- off. You may Imagine my surprise to see a lot of small saws soldered to the side of the tin, and on further exami nation wo found that they completely encircled the can. and that the other was in exactly the same condition. At that 1 began to have a faint ink ling of the truth and lost no time mak ing a few inquiries. I found that the Alabama captain was the sheriff of his county and the Invalid brother had been one of his official guests. He was a burglar and had since been sent to prison for ten years. The scheme was pretty shrewd. In the first place, the sheriff would not be apt to be suspicious of a package of goods com ing direct from a reputable business house, and, even if he opened the cans before giving them to the prisoner, there would be nothing wrong inside. The crook must have been bitterly disappointed when he examined the substitutes that I sent. The saws, as we afterward found out, were highly tempered aad could cut stell bar like yellow pine. Who was the woman in black, did you ask? I have no idea; probably a sister, or wife, or sweet heart. 1 never laid eyes on her after ward."—The New Orleans Times democrat. EYESIGHT OE SAVAGES. NO DOUBT THAT IT IS SUPERIOR TO THAT OF CIVIL IZ _D MEN. But Whether the Superiority 1 lunntn or tlie JteHiilt of Training Under H Wider Horizon IN Another Tiling—Dif ferences Are Mot All on One Side. That, men who can see well will learn to shoot better than men who do not see well is a fact so patent that we do not wonder Sir Redvers Bul ler's remark about the superior eye sight of the Boers attracted public at tention. He thinks, it is said, that the Boer has the "eyesight of a savage," and sees two miles further than the Englishman, and of course that fact, if it is proved, furnishes sufficient ex planation of many British mishap 3 in the South African campaign, and ac counts for losses of life which might otherwise be attributed to a reckles3 disregard of necessary precautions. But we do not quite understand the deduction so generally drawn from Sir Redvers' statement that savaye eye sight is naturally better than the eye sight of civilized men. Why should it be better? There is no difference of structure in the eyeball, and the difference in health is rather in favor of the civilized man. The latter no doubt very often loses something of the keenness of his sight from much reading and the use of artificial light, but Tommy Atkins Is no philosopher, reads little more than the savage, and burns no midnight oil. The truth is the Boer, like the sav age, habitually trains his eye, as the sailor does, to look into the far dis tance, and acquires from that train ing. and the habit of close attention to all signs of movement on the part of his quarry, a power of quick percep tion which seems to thoso without it almost miraculous. He sees game or an enemy minutes before Tommy can, just as the sailor sees a sail or a smoke minutes before a landsman can, but there is no difference of ori ginal or natural powers. Tommy could be trained. If we took sufficient trouble to train him and allowed suffi cient time, just as well as the Boer, and very often is trained when he Is a gamekeeper, or in any other way de pendent upon the aeutoness of his sight. Let any one who doubts this just take a walk with an ornitholo gist, and remark what the latter sees, and at what distance, when compared with himself. The matter is of some interest, not only because the ifl-ivate soldier has to be taught to shoot as well as any ene my, but because it bears upon the very large question whether civiliza tion necessarily diminishes the phy sical powers of the average human be ing. If it does, that is a great draw back to civilization, because it pre cludes the hope of man ever develop ing a kind of aristocracy with the powers of both body and mind in creased to a point far beyond present experience. That is the dream, the rather lofty dream as it seems to us, of the dons who foster athletics as well as reading in their pupils; but if the reading spoils physical as much as it develops mental power, that is a dream impossible of realization. But does study necessarily have the effect of spoiling sinews? That it does so is a very natural idea, because the savage seems so much more agile, and is, besides, trained by his mode of life, which the civilized man is not; but we do not know that there is any solid evidence for the notion. The "big, black, bounding beggar," as Rud.vard Kipling called him, can outrun the citizen, or outwalk hint in a long march, or throw him in a wres tle for life, but the trained runner will outstrip the savage, the gamekeeper will walk with him till he drops from fatigue, and the Cumberland wrestler will like nothing better than to throw him over his head. The whole differ ence is that the savage Is always, from the habits of his life, in a condition which the citizen only roaches after weeks of careful training have re stored him to the full exercise of his natural powers. Just give a savage who has never been accustomed to carry weight, say a red Indian of the North American forest the weight to carry under which the British soldier habitually marches, and see which of them will give out first, though the savage has even then the advantage of having whlked every day to his full power all his life. If it were not so, man as an animal would differ from all other animals, for it is notorious that no wild horse can keep pace with a racer and no wild dog can escape a hound. The Kanaka, it is true, of th South Seas, can usually swim much farther than any civilized man, bu then what civilized man passes half his life in swimming in water just warm enough to give his lungs fail play? There is, we admit, one faculty in which the savage appears hopelessly to distance his rival. He retains, or appears to retain, tho superior sense of smell, which belongs to so many animals, or perhaps, in different de grees, to ail, detecting, for example, the odor of water or of land from a great distance; but then smell is the one sense which the civilized man, it may be from an instinct of self-de fence, never cultivates at all, but per mits to die unused. It is of course possible thnt in a clear, dry air like that of South Africa the eye acquires a certain keennos which is wanting to the eye used for generations to a humid atmosphere; but that, if it. oc curs. is not duo to any defect imposed by the conditions of civilization. It is more like the extra thickness of skuil which enables the negro to resist the direct rays of an African sun without discomposure or brain disease. The truth is, we believe, that civil fzed man when cultivated up to a cer tain point acquire* a latent spita against civilization, as essentially based upon a system of rather weari some restrictions. He longß for mora freedom, or, as he calls it, simplicity of life, and, being half inclined to revert to savagery, wishes to credit the savage with all the attractiveness ho can. So strong was this feeling in the last century that the "state of na ture," which is really the state of tho brutes, was represented through an entire literature as worthy of admir-v tion. Serious thinkers, iu France es pecially, actually believed in tho "noble" savage, and even in some in stances ventured to paint him as the "geltlest" of human beings. He is, as a matter of fact, neither gentle nor noble. Allowing, of course, for a very few individual exceptions, he is more capricious, revengeful, listful, and cruel than the lowest of the civilized tribes, with the addtion of a callous ness like that of Fiji King Thakom bau, who used to launch his new war boat 3 by running them to the water over the bodies of his slaves, whom the weight of the boats disembowelled as they pnssed. He is usually treacher ous, partly, it may be, from incapacity for continuous thought, and always greedy, while he is almost without ex ception more inclined to drunkenness than the least abstinent of the civil* ized races.—London Spectator. A RACE FOR A MINEc A Midwinter DIIMII to I.ocute Iho T. Hour Mine. "An exciting race for a mine took place in February, 1896. For many years it had been known that the Col* ville Indian reservation was rich in minerals, and prospectors had slipped! in. eluding the vigilance of the Indian police, to explore the mountains in northern Washiiffeton. But long be fore white men had entered the In dians knew that the top of a low mountain near the nation's border liife was covered with bright blue stones, so gaudy that many were car ried off and placed in the wigwams. The prospectors knew that these gay stones betokened the existence of cop per veins, and many a hungry eyo was cost at that rock-strewn patch of ground before the government lifted the ban that kept out paleface in truders. "But congress passed a law opening part of the reservation to mineral lo cation. "Waiting for the president to sign the formal proclamation, two parties quietly entered the forbidden territory and camped alongside the promising vein. At Marcus, the nearest tele graph station, two young meq waited with tense nerves for the first tick that would tell that the president had signed the proclamation. It was a cold, gray winter day, and the snow was piled high. Late in the afternoon the word came, and there was a simul taneous dash for the horses that were waiting outside. Then the race began. Plunging through drifts, tumbling down declines, toiling desperately up steep hills and bounding at full speed over the level stretches, those two horses bore their riders. Sometimes one was ahead and sometimes the other. The sun disappeared and the hurrying pair blundered along through the deepening twilight, and then in the light of the stars reflected by the glistening snow. Spurs were plunged so deep that flecks of blood stained the snow. Almost side by side they scrambled up the mountain. The yells of the riders were heard in the dis tance by the rival watchers, who did not wait a further hint, but drove the stakes that were to locate tho La Flour mine. "Then followed wordy disputes, fist fights and the flourishing of Winches ters, but before the mine was chris tened with blood, one party concluded to withdraw and fight its battle in the courts."—Eugene B. Palmer, in Ainslee's Magazine. QUAINT AND CURIOUS. In bread-making on an expensive scale less than a third of the time is now taken. One thousand pounds of dough for biscuits is rolled, cut and prepared for baking in three hours and 54 minutes, as against 54 hours by hand. There is in Paris a hotel which has 4000 employes. The smallest kettle in its kitchen contains 100 quarts and the largest 500. Each of 50 roasting pans is big enough for 300 cutlet 3. Every dish for halting potatoes holds 223 pounds. When omelets are on the bill of fare 7330 eggs are used at once. For cooking alone 00 cooks and 100 assistants are always at the ranges. At a gathering of old folks in the town of Claremont. Mass., the othpr day, the chairman called upon all present who were over 70 years of age to arise, and 72 responded. Ho then B.sVed all those who were over 80 tc btand up, and there were 12 who had passed that limit. A similar call for all over the age of 90 brought four members of the gathering to their feet. Three weights not long ago found on the site of the ancient Forum at Rome supply an accurate record of the Roman standard for two centuries before our era. Tho weights, which are of dark green marble with bronze -andies, represent respectively 20< 30 nd 100 Roman pounds, and show that the ancient Latin pound was exactly 325 grammes, or a little less than three-quarters of a pound avoirdupois. SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. The fuse wire used in electric light ing systems and trolley cars is a com position of lead and bismuth. The proportions are varied somewhat to liter the hardness of the wire. It is asserted that the electric fur nace has been adapted to glass manu facture. The raw materials arc fed through a funnel to an electric arc in the highest part of the furnace. After being reduced to a molten condition I it is successively passed between two j other electric arcs lower down in the I furnace, finally issuing in a purified I condition. Drs. Mactayden and Rowland In their experiments on the influence of low temperatures on bacteria have found that though a certain degree of heat is destructive to bacteria they flourish vigorously and show no alter ation in their appearance after being subjected to the very low temperatures attained by the use of liquid air and liquid hydrogen, even though exposed to them for a week. The selection of l micro-organisms experimented on in cluded germs of typhoid, cholera and diphtheria. An Interesting exploration of Lake Tanganyika and the country north of it, finished recently, revealed the fact that while certain sea mollusks are found in the lake, it the the only one of all the large African lakes in which such phenomena are observed. This lake in only a short distance, some 80 miles, from the great Congo basin, much of which, without doubt, was once covered by the sea. The halolim nic fauna appeared to extend into the Congo valley, and it is believed that the lake at one time extended consid erably to tho west. Lake Nyassa, on the other hand, has every character istic of a fresh water lake, and the geo logical fauna does not indicate that this lake is of any great age. The discovery has just been made that camphor, known only as a vege table product, or made synthetically, is produced by a small worm-like crea ture known as a diplopod with the scientific name of polyzoninium rosal bium. The animal is found In this country, and by careful examination it has been found that the substance which gives the odor of camphor is a milky fluid which is exuded from the dorsal pores. This fluid, in addition to possessing the odor of camphor, has a similar taste. Enough of tho camphor has not as yet been obtained for chem ical analysis, but it is considered a physiological substitute for the prussic acid secreted as a means of defense by a species of myriapod. The changing of certain growing flowers from red to blue on applying alum, etc., to the roots of tho plants has been long known; but it has re matned for the late systematic re searches of Minyoshi, a Japanese bot anist, to open up remarkable new pos sibilities of coloration by the florist. Tho experimenter prepared watery ex tracts of 73 different flowers of lilac, purple and red colors, and of a num ber of red leaves, treating these solu tions In turn with acids, alkalies and salts. What seemed to be the same coloring matter in different solutions gave greatly varying results. In most case 3 alum turned lilac to blue, pink or deeper lilac; hydrochloric acid changed lilac or pale red to deep red, seldom producinglilac.green or brown; and caustic potash changed lilac to green, or sometimes yellow. In prac tice these color transformations should follow tho application of tho chemicals to the plant roots, of course in ex tremely weak solutions. VALUE OF TELEPHONE NUMBERS. Munv forma 1 ':iy Heavy Mileage Hates to Old " Hello" Anurous. "Telephone numbers have an actual money value." said an officer of the telephone company. "The assertion has a strange sound, but if you think for a moment of the advantage a busi ness house derives from having its location well known, the thing seems only natural. "In the course of time people's minds begin to associate a firm with Its telephone number, and if, when they start to call up an old friend, they find masquerading under a now number, it is as much of a shock as if they had called at a houße with whom they were in the habit of doing busi ness and found it had moved away. It all comes under the legal head of ' good-will," a very elusive commodity, hut one which has its market value. "So much is this fact appreciated by some of our old patrons that they are willing to pay heavy mileage, if they move away from the neighbor hood of their exchange, in order to retain their old telephone address. Many important houses have followed the northward trend of business in the last few years, and there are sev eral caEes of a firm's office address being In the up town district, while its telephone number remains so and so Cortlandt or Broad The firm's line to the exchange may be several miles long."—New York Mail and Express. Knaainn Bella. The manufcture of bells has for cen turies Seen carried on in Russia. On account of the immense number of churches throughout the empire, the, demand for bells has always been great. As far back as 1653 the cele brated bell, called "Tyar Kolokol," was made. It is the largest bell in the world, being 18 feet in diameter and 19 feet high. No less than 17V tons of ccppcr were used in it 3 manufacture.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers