The Sun.
London, England, 1869-11-16 00:00:00

Mr. iVatsonville, noted as a practical joker, was
asked by a lady iu the stage coach from Gilroy
Hot Springs to San Francisco to take her inside
seat and give her the outside, as she felt unwell.
The lady had made herself obnoxious at the Springs,
and as she passed the practical joker she directed him
to take care of the two bottles of mineral water she
had left on the seat which she was carrying to her
husband. The practical joker's first act was to
open each, pour out half, and fill up with whisky,
and we leave the husband to tell the result :

"San Francisco, Aug. 30, 1869

'Proprietors Hot springs.—Sirs,—You are a precious
set of -scamps, you are! My wife, Mrs. —, paid a visit
to your confounded place and brought back some spring
water.' I drank about a bottle of the miserable stuff and
went to the Goad Templars, and hadn't been in the ball
more than fifteen minutes bofore I was as drunk as any
man you ever saw; disgracid myself and the lodge, and
this morning I sin on a sick bed. My impression is that
any set of men who will run an institution of this kind
ought to be soused into hot water springs until life was
extinct.—l am, sirs, with contempt, —.”
The lightning trains now making such fast time
between New York and Chicago render the drivers
cautious, as the following incident will show. As
the engineer on his way from Indianapolis reflected
on the manner he had been lately treated by Jim
Fisk, and the starvation to his family that would
follow a smash, he raised his tear-dimmed eye and
beheld right before him, and bearing down straight
upon him, the headlight of a locomotive ! Quicker
than lightning he whistled the breaks down and
reversed his engine, and when the speed of his train
was checked sufficiently, he sent his fireman off in
hot haste to flag the approaching train. By this
time the passengers were all out in the woods, and
the conductor was at the side of the frantic engineer,
when the following conversation occurred : —" Con-
ductor (furious) : What the deuce did you stop the
train for ?" Engineer (breathless) : " Collision, sir.
'Don't you see that locomotive ?" Conductor (red
Lot) : " No, sir, I tee the moon, you blamed fool."
In less than two minutes the train was thun-
dering ahead at the rate of forty miles an hour.—
A butcher, whose meat had often been stolen by a
large dog, went to lawyer Tappan and asked hi-Ca
what to do under the circumstances. " Sue the
owner and recover the price," was the prompt
answer. "Ah !" exclaimed the butcher, exultingly,
"It was your dog, Mr. Tappan." "My dog, was
it ?" said the unabashed Tappan, " what was the
value of the beef ?" "Three dollars," was theanswer.
"Very well," said Mr.'l appeal, pulling out the green-
backs and handing them over; but the smiling butcher
had not closed the office door ere the same hand
was again stretched out. " I charge you $5 for a
consultation."—An enterprising coloured man of
Trenton, New Jersey, devised a petition to the
Common Council of that city, asking for an enlarge-
ment of the school-house for coloured children. It
occurred to him that the signatures of c,rtain white
folks might be serviceable, and he applied for and
obtained a large number. The petition commences,
" We, the parents of the coloured children !"—A
coloured boy, who may be seen any day, with a
basket of edibles on his arm, entered an office on
Wall-street, w i. h his usual exclamation of " Cakes,
pies, and sand wiches"--when the following colloquy
between the proprietor and the darkey ensued :
" Ah, Fain, how is the pie-trade to- d iy ?" " Well,
Massa, it ain't so gotd now, since the gold excite-
ment." " Why, what has the gold excitement to
do with the pie business, I should like to know ?"
" Oh, you see, Sir, I used to sell a great many pies
to the brokers, all along Broad-street, and now it
'pears like they hadn't got no appetite."--A quaint
fellow, well-known in the White Mountains, named
Peter limes, foralerly " leading whip" on the
Mereeith route, thus "sold" aparty of eager listeners
after an attempt to bag some nice partridge for ex-
pected guests. " Gentlemen," he said to the throng
aroundov hen he had got something to drinkand time to
cool from his excitement, " I only tell you the solemn
truth, and you can believe me or not as you please.
I went to the woods, tramped over the best partridge
ground, climbed half way up Red Hill, and poked
around until well nigh sundown, without seeing
the blessed thing worth shooting. Finally, I started
for home with an empty game-bag. I'd got down
to the old lodging by the brook, and as I was turn-
ing down by the bank 1 happened to cast my eyes
upon a little cluirp of white maples that just grew
over the brook. You know where they are ? Well,
the fancy struck me that I'd fire into the thicket.
I didn't really think there was anything there, but
I wanted to tinpty my gun, and I thought I might
as well make a shot as not. So I set both hammers,
and took aim right straight at the middle of the
clump, where the leaves were the thickest. If any-
body had told me there was game in there for me
I wouldn't have believed 'em. I didn't expect it.
But I let drive—fired both barrels at once—and I
heard the shot crash through the thickly patched
boughs. Over the brook I jumped, and went to
the maples. Goodness gracious! You won't be-
we will. What was it ?" And
ltiheeveexmciete?d",
ea"gYs'eremultitude pressed nearer. " What
did you shoot, Peter ? What did you find?" " Just
as I bad expected," replied Peter, edging towards
the door. "I didn't believe there was anything

there, and—there wasn't !"
Au Irishman recently stopped at a hotel
Des Moines, lowa, where pretty high bills were
charged. In the morning the landlord made
out the amount of damages, and presented it to
the guest. After he had glanced it over, the latter looked
the landlord in the face and exclaimed, "Yo put me in mind
of a snipe." " Why ?" asked the landlord. "Because ye're
very nigh all bill."—Six insane brokers, results of the re-
cent " Gold Corner," are announced in New York, and it
is proposed that the reporters " interview " them,
and get their opinions of the financial situation.—
Some persistent rascal broke into three different rooms of
the Nipmuc Rhode Island depot the other night, and
"netted" exactly six cents to reward him for his labour.
—A Providence paper thinks that a man who will go to
Nipmuc to steal is undoubtedly insane.—" A little more
animation, my dear," whispered Mrs. A to the gentle
Susan, who was walking languidly through a quadrille.
" Do leave me to manage my own business, mamma," replied
the prudent nymph. " I shall not dance my ringlets out
of curl for a married man." "Of course not, my love,
but I was not aware who your partner was."—Our
pleasant contemporary, the Evening .31ail, says the
lately amalgamated New York Citizen, inquires why
the Citizen-Round-Table, as it calls our paper, does
not drop the last three—we suppose it means two—sec-
tions of the name. To drop these would leave us poor in-
deed—as bare as Miss Olive Logan's victims of the nude
drama—and we only keep the two latter subdivisions out
of regard for the love which the good people have for set-
tled things.

RAILROAD NEWS.—A Railroad Convention, to
consider the project of a road to be known as the Kansas
City, Springfield, and Memphis Railroad, was held at
Kansas City, on October 19th ; Delegates were present
from Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri. Colonel J. M.
Richardson, of Springfield, Missouri, was elected Pre-
sident, and R. D. Williams, of Kansas City, Secretary.—
Mr. Simon Stevens, President of the Tehuantepec Rail-
way Company, states that the company are about com-
pleting their new topographical map of the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, together with the profiles of the railway
and the estimates of the quantities of the different kinds
of work to be done, and the cost of the same. The com-
pany expected to receive proposals from contractors by
the 10th of November.—The Southern Minnesota Road
has a valuable land grant, and is now pushing its line
West of La Crosse through the Southern border
of Minnesota, crossing the Minnesota Central at Austin, in
Mower County. An important project is the contemplated
extension of a branch of this road to Fort Dodge, in Web-
ster County, a distance of 100 miles, or Eldora, in Hardin
• County, to roach and make available for Minnesota mar-
kets the rich coalfields of Northern lowa.—The Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad now embraces the lines from Columbus,
Ohio, to Wheeling, West Virginia, from Wheeling to Pal-
timore, from Baltimore to Washington, from Grafton to
Parkersburg, and from Newark, Ohio, to Sandusky, mak-
ing an aggregate of TN miles. —The Pennsylvania
Railroad Company is now engaged in building an im-
mense grain receiver on the I auks of the Schuylkill
River, above Market-street,
front Philadethelphiab . It is
to the
125
feet wide and 555 feet long ; ottom
roof line is 36 foot, and to the apex of the roof 66
feet. To obtain support in the marshy sub-surface of the
liver bank, it was found necessary to sink several
rows of piles, and en these, at short iuterva!s, columns
of masonry thirteen feet high aro built. On these aro
placed the trestles which support the building.- The iron
on the main line of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad is
now laid as far as Summit Lake, 95 miles front St. Paul,
and the work is now progressing at the rate of a mile a
day. The grading is completed to the Chippewa River,
and before the snow flies the entire line to Breckenridge
will be graded. The iron, however, will probably be bad
this fall only some 75 miles further, or 170 miles from St
Paul. This will leave only 55 miles of iron to be laid nett
spring to complete the road.