"row ri7i-r-
: -III WV-i
VOL. XV.
NEW BLOOMPIELD, IPA.., TUESDAY, MA.KOII B, 1881.
NO. 10.
ifeS
l i:
vr. v ivcd m ; v lift n ; ..
THE TIMES.
An Independent Family Newspaper,
II FUBLHHBD BVBBT TUBSDAY Bf
F. MORTIMER & CO.
0 -
TE11M8 i
INVARIABLY IN ADVANCE.
f 1.30 PEIl VEAU, POSTACJK FIIEE,
90 CTS. t oil MONTHS.
TosutucrlbersrmlrtlnKlnTinK cotmrr, where
we have no postage to pay. a dlsnnunt of 2.t cents
from the above terms will be made If payment la
made la advance.
W Advertising rates furnished upon appllca
tlou.
SINGULAR DISCOVERIES.
A Chapter of Incidents.
GIVEN lncllnatlou to undertake, and
leisure to perform the task, any one
who would hunt up records of unexpect
ed finds, remarkable in their nature, or
by reason of the circumstances under
which they were made, might easily fill
a goodly Blzed volume with the result of
their researches. Pending bucu a com
plication, we have made note of some
things not generally known In the way
of singular finds, and hope a little chat
about them will prove acceptable to our
readers.
An Interesting discovery, at least from
an archaeological point of view, was
strangely brought about several years
ago. Two men were tried before the
Court of Assizes of the Basses-Pyrenees
for a series of burglaries and highway
robberies. The evidence against them
was Irresistable ; but none of the plun
der could be traced, until one of them,
Kivas, gave a hint toward solving the
mystery, which sent a commissary of
police to a cavern in the mountains. To
scale the precipitous sides of the moun
tains was no easy task ; but the officers
persevered.and were rewarded by finding
an enormous quantity of stolen property.
The commissary having shown that the
cavern was accessible, some savants
soon found their way there, and ex
ploring it thoroughly, brought to light
the remains of animals of enormous
size, flint hatchets, ornamented pottery,
and a number of Koman medals of the
third century. The advocate of Blvas
tried to turn this to account, and asked
the jury to look upon the prisoner as a
pioneer of science; but they did not see
the force of the argument, and he and
his fellow in crime received their deserts.
Londoners do not look to stumble
upon strange reptiles on their way to
business, or be startled by rare ' birds
taking the air in the streets. Yet within
the last twenty years a snake was found
"at large" In Fleet Street among some
woodwork ; a chameleon was rescued
from death at the wheels of a Holburn
omnibus ; and a kingfisher captured in
the courtyard of a British Museum,
snake, cameleon and kingfisher being as
much out of their latitude as the poor
pig that fell into the saving hands of
the crew of a Lowestoft lugger, while
battling bravely with the waves six
miles from land.
A shark, eleven feet in length, which
was caught off the Scotch coast was
found to contain a whole ling, a man's
bonnet, sundry remnants of fish, and a
soda-water bottle corked and sealed.
The bottle was smashed and a paper,
signed Annette Gordon, was found. It
ran thus: " On board the Beautiful Star,
Sunday, 1st September, 1872. We have
crossed the line, and all's well. Last
night the captain's lady had a pretty
little boy.
"Heaven bless tlie little stranger,
Rocked on the cradle of the deep !
gave it, Jord, from every danger!
The angels bright their watch will keep. .
Oh, gently sooth its tender years,
And so allay a parent's fears,
A father's love, mother's joy )
May all that's good attend their boy !"
How long a time it took for that com
munication to come to land, we are una
ble to say. Messages committed to
Neptune's charge are apt to be long
delayed. The London wag lost in the
Bay of Biscay in January, I860; it was
not till near the close of the following
year that a bottle was picked up in
Exmouth harbor, contained a tailor'
bill, ou the back of which was written,
" Lost in the ship London, Francis Day.
Advertise to my friends that I have
three thousand pounds in the London
and Westminster Bank." Welcome as
the information! may have been to those
concerned, there was probably greater
gratitude felt for that conveyed in the
slip of paper inclosed In a bottle cast
ashore on the coast of Wexford : " The
finder of this is to tell Elizabeth Gran,
ton, of Ashton Grange, on the borders
of London, E. C, that the seoret of her
birth will be found behind the picture of
the Earl of Warwick in the drawing
room ; and receive the blessing of a
dying man."
The Bank of England has had no end
of valuables committed to Us keeping.
The vaults of its establishment hold
mouldering chests, deposited there for
safety's sake, and apparently forgotten
by their owners. In 1872 one fell to
pieces from sheer rottenuess, exposing
to sight a quantity of massive plate and
a bundle of yellow papers. The latter
proved to be a collection of love-letters of
the period of the Restoration, which the
directors were enabled to restore to the
lineal descendants of the original own
ers. In 1875 a tin box was fished out of the
Seine containing more than Ave hun
dred letters addressed to divers persons
in Paris. The boxset afloat several
miles above Paris had been hermetic
ally sealed, and was furnished with
metal sails, that it might catch the
current of the river at every point; but
it bad failed to achieve a successful voy
age, and lain at the river's bottom for
years with Its freight of letters for the
besieged Parisians, some of whom,
however, had the gratification of receiv
ing them five years after date.
The betrothed of a young watchmak
er, living at Prescott, had to wait even
longer for one of his love letters. He
posted it in Coventry, in August, 1807 ;
but the fair one did not receive it.
Luckily, no mischief arose between the
pair in consequence ; the course of true
love ran smoothly for once, and they
were soon afterward married and settled,
taking up their abode in the street in
which the lady had lived before the
marriage. One day in 1878, a worn,
crumpled letter came to her. It was the
lost love letter. It had slipped down a
niche in a mail-van, and been discover
ed upon the condemnation and breaking
up of the vehicle.
At Highgate, near London, stands a
public-house, from the window of which
a skeleton cat challenges the notice of
the passers-by. In its teeth it bold a
skeleton rat, caught no one knows how
long ago. Just as we see them now, cat
and rat were taken from the chimney,
where the house was undergoing altera
tion. A more grisly chimney-find fell
to some workmen a few years since in
the old house in the High Street of Hull,
notable as the birth-place of Wllberforce,
the slave emancipator, for the skeleton
they disturbed was a human one. A
banking business was at one time carled
on in the house, so the bones were set
down to belong to a thief who, hiding
in the chimney, either preliminary to
committing felony, or to escape pursuit
after committing it, had been suffocated.
Burglars and robbers sometimes get
into tight places, and fall a sacrifice to
their evil ways. Nunez, the Spanish
banker, had a strong room in his bank
at Lerida which was never entered un
less some heavy payment in gold had
been made. To this there were origin
ally two keys, but one of them mysteri
ously disappeared. One day it became
necessary for the cashier to visit the
reserve safe, and be was not a little
startled at finding that there was a key
already in the lock. He hurried to
Nunez with the news; and the banker
himself opened the strong-room door.
Inside lay the body of a man, the
corpse of a discharged bank servant.
He bad stolen the missing key, and
availed himself of an opportunity to
rifle the safe; but too eager perhaps to
finger the coin, had forgotten that the
door fastened with a spring, and letting
it close behind him, had wrought his
own punishment.
In January, 1878, the soda-laden ship
Irvine arrived in the Thames from Peru,
and discharged her cargo at Rotheihlthe.
Imbedded in the soda was found the
well-preserved body of a woman, sup.
posed we know not on what evidence
to be one of the victims of an earth
quake occurring many' centuries ago.
There was not such utter uncertainty
respecting a wooden coffin containing a
guano effigy of a man, discovered in
1845, some seventeen feet from the top
of the guano mound In Ichaboe; for
although the coffin and its contents
crumbled to dust after an hour's expos
ure to the air, the finders managed to
decipher all that remained of a rude
inscription, namely, " berman," and
'080," and to come to the conclusion
that the remains were those of the
carpenter or tombermann of a Dutch
sailing ship, who bad departed this life
in 10M9.
The child of a Dutch farmer at the
Cape was wont to spend his klle hours
on the river-bank searching for pretty
pebbles. One of .the youngster's acqui
sitions attracted his mother's notice as
something out of the common, and she
showed it to a neighbor curious in such
things. He would have bought it; but
Mrs. Jacobs ridiculed the Idea, and made
him a present of it. He kept it a little
while and then as readily parted with it
to somebody wiser than himself, who
passed it on to a friend having sufficient
curiosity U post It in an ordinary un
registered letter to Dr. Atherstone, a
mineralogist in Graham'B Town. The
expert declared the boy's pebble to be a
veritable diamond ; as such it was ex
hibited in the Paris Exhibition of 18G7,
and purchased by an English gentleman
for five thousand pounds.
Some five or six years ago, a young
man was traversing the mountains,
canons.and valleys of Esmeralda county,
Nevada, prospecting for gold and silver.
As he looked down on the valley of
Teel's Marsh, he saw a vast bed of white
sand or something like it, and was
tempted to examine it. He found the
place to be a bed of dry lagoon, five
miles In length, andabdat half as wide ;
and what had been taken for white sand
proved to be a clay-like deposit, in
which he sank ankle-deep as be cau
tiously walked over it. Filling his
pockets with the curious stuff1, be
mounted his horse again and rode to his
home in Columbus. There an assayer
pronounced the contents of his pockets
the finest samples of crude borax he had
ever seen. The astonished prospector
one of the large family of Smiths lost
no time in making formal claims to his
find; and that obtained, he and his
brother went to work with tanks, boilers,
crystallizers, and all necessary appli
ances, and are at the present writing,
the masters of an immense establish
ment, driving a very profitable trade,
one likely to be as permanent as profita
ble, since the deposit of borax in Teel'a
Marsh reproduces itself every two or
three years, so that Smith Bros., have
no fear of the supply failing.
The Mysterious Pants.
ON Monday a gentleman of Xenia,
who has a comley wife, left home
to transact some business in Cincinnati.
It was his expressed intention to remain
absent from his home eeveral days.
He found upon reaching Cincinnati that
he could finish his business much more
speedily than he bad anticipated. He
came home. He got back much sooner
than he was expected by his wife. It
was well he was able to return so prompt
ly, for he found his life-partner in the
midst of a serious illnes. It was at night
when the husband came home, and his
wife had retired. She apparently slept.
Disrobing, the husband also "turned
in." The wife, for a time, was bo help
lessly sick she couldn't speak, and the
husband kindly restrained from disturb
ing her, as he presumed she was asleep.
After a short time the wife recovered
sufficiently to acquaint her lord with
the fact that she was bo seriously ill that
be would have to hurry out to the drug
store for some medicine. Of course the
husband instantly prepared to obey.
He knew just what to get for the lady,
because she had frequently been attack
ed by a certain kind of spell, or spasm,
and no doubt that was the nature of the
trouble that had overtaken Madame
during Monsieur's absence. It was the
work of but a few seconds to drees and
start for the drug store. There was no
time to strike a light, but none was
needed, for the gentleman easily found
sufficient clothing to fit him out for the
trip.
At the apothecaries he prooured the
necessary medicine, and running bis
hand down into his pocket, and felt for
some cash to pay for it. He was a little
surprised to run foul of a knife in his
pocket. He was astonished, because he
had no knife of his own, and he hadn't
borrowed any of late. Upon exploring
the pocket he hauled out a pocket-book
containing $70 or $80. His surprise
increased at this, because the pocket
book was a strange one to him, and the
money wasn't his.
The gentleman was very busy for the
following few minutes. He was busy
thinking. There was something wrong.
The pantaloons he bad on just then
were not the ones he laid aside on retir
ing. Yet he had got the unmentiona
bles in his wife's room, and contiguous
to her bed. The drug clerk recognized
the stranger's pants as a pair worn by a
prominent citizen of Xenla. That set
tled it. But, to make the affair more
binding, the husband's own breeches
were not to be found When he returned
home with the medicine for his sick
wife. They were gone.
Hereupon the husband took a slate
and commenced to figure. He calculat
ed that some one had taken advantage
of the loneliness of his wife during his
absence, or that his wife had taken
advantage of his absence during her
loneliness, and that the owner of the
strange pants had been concealed in the
bed-chamber when he (the husband) re
turned. Also, that the trip to the drug
store had been mapped out in order to
allow the interloper to retreat. In
retreating the interloper had made a
mistake as to pantaloons also. Hence
the scandal.
The Deaoon Won Her.
"7AAB, there's money made in
X stocks, no doubt." said the old
man, as he removed his bat and ran bis
fingers through his gray locks, "but it's
a reesky blzuess ; it's sutbln' like bet
ting on whar lightning's going to strike
with the odds in favor of hitting the
tree you stand under."
" Then you never speculate ?"
" Never, I dig along on the old farm,
takin' one crop with another, and pull
ing out stumps when I've nothing else
to do, and if I don't make any great
shakes, I haven't anything to worry
over. I had a purty solemn warning
during the coal-ile excitement, and it
cured me of speculatin'."
"How is that?"
" Waal, I was a widower then ; wife
fell down the well and was drawed out
as stiff as a poker. I had a big farm,
lots of stock, and was called purty solid.
We all got excited about ile, and all of
us dug more or less boles in search of
the stuff. All of a sudden a wider livin'
about two miles from me found ile in a
dozen places on her farm. She was a
widder with a bad nose, freckles all over
her face, eyes on the squint, and built
up like a camel. But when she struck
ile that was a different thing. Old
Deacon Spooner, who was a widower,
got mashed right away. Our preacher,
who had lost his third wife, saw the
spec. I thought it over and thought
she was an angel. I guess some six or
seven of us begun courtln' that widder
within sixteen hours after the first sign
of ile.' I know the procession reached
from the gate to the house."
"And you got her?"
";Not much I didn't, and that's what
I'm thankful for. Somehow or other I
couldn't work up to the pint. That
nose kinder stood in the way every
time I was ready to pop the question
She acted like she wanted me, but
Deacon Spooner got the best of us all,
and they mode a hitch."
"And what?"
" Nothing, except she had dotted that
farm with a barrel of ile, and thus got a
husband for herself and a home for her
five children. When the news came
out X was so cold along the back bone
that they had to klver me up with a
boss-blanket, and since that time
haven't had the nerve to buy eggs at
seven cents a dozen and hold 'em for a
rise." . '
How Women Travel by Rail in Russia.
A lady smoker on a railway train iu
the United States, we can thankfully
say, is a curiosity, always looked upon
with disgust. But in Russia, feminine
smokers seem to rule the day on rail
roads, as the following story will show :
" The other day," saya a correspondent
to a German newspaper, " I accompani
ed a lady relative to the Nicholas Rail
way Depot, St. Petersburg, Russia,
from which place she wanted to take
the evening express for Moscow, and on
showing her first class ticket, she appli
ed to the conductor for a seat in a ladles'
coup or compartment, which generally
seats from eight to ten persons. To our
great surprise we found this coup the
only apartment ' For Ladies,' on the
train, was occupied by lady smokers,
and the apartment was so filled with
smoke that even a tobacco using' man
would bave felt miserable in it. When
I asked whether smoking was permitted
the conductor gave me an answer in the
affirmative ; thereupon I went to the
chief agent at the depot and politely
asked blm whether be could not furnish
me.with a seat in a ladles' coach, where
smoking was prohibited, but I received
this answer : ' There are gentlemen's
coaches for those who do not smoke in
which women may sit, but apartments
expressly for ladles where smoking is
prohibited do not exist on our trains."
'Why, how is a lady traveling alone to
do when she cannot stand such smoke ?'
'Why let her go in the car for gentlemen
marked No Smoking.' "
The Sailor on Shore.
An old East Indian captain gave up
sea-faring, and was having a house built
in which to end his days in peace. One
morning, while watching the carpen
ters, he noticed that they let bits of lath
and the .like drop down between the
partitions, and he ordered them to take
all the loose pieces out. The workmen
obeyed, grumbling that they did not
see what difference it made. " All the
difference in the world, you lubbers 1"
retorted the irate captain. " Do you
think I want to be annoyed, whenever
she rocks, by the rattle of the rubbish in
the partitions?"
tW The Glasgow Herald states that
while some workmen were engaged
about half a mile east from Fort Wil
liam in deepening the dam which sup
plies the Nevis Distillery with water,
one of the men came upon a large shell
in a complete state. It was embedded
in the moss, and it was found to be
fifteen inches in diameter and weighed
about 100 pounds. The powder was
quite fresh-looking, only the portion of
it near the fuse being damp. The fuse
Itself was burnt out. The shell is sup
posed to be one of those fired from the
fort in April, 1746, at a battery raised
by the young Pretender's ("Prince
Charlie's") men at the Cralgs, within
COO yards of the fort.
tSFThere was a church fair at Muncie,
Ark., and photographs of the young
women who were to serve at the stands
were displayed in the windows of the
stores, including those who were in
character costumes. A traveling bur
lesque company came along at the same
time, and portraits of blondes in tights
were placed alongside the others. The
pastor hastily removed the pictures of
the Muncie girls. Then the theatrical
managers placarded the actresses' pict
ures with: " These artists have no con
nection whatever with the amateur
performance at the Baptist church, and
can only be seen at Tabor hall."
t3T Henry Holtenburg had black hair
and a ruddy complexion when he mar
ried Miss Schwarz, at Nashville, a year
ago. She supposed be was about forty,
though he made no statement on that
point. The honey' moon was scarcely
over before bis hair became gray, bis
cheeks lost their color, and he showed
at least sixty years. The fact was that
he had discontinued the use of dye and
rouge. The angry wife wanted to sue
for divorce, but the lawyer told her that
the grounds were not sufficient. The
worst she could do was to desert him,
which she lost no time in doing.
t" Female printer pop the question
to the mate typos by elmply handing to
them an ? If the latter intends to em
brace the opportunity and accept, they
return a braoe, thua but If they
wish to deollne and dashthe cup of hap
piness from the fair one's lips, they
hand over a .