Connecticut western news., 1878-04-25
GENERAL ITEMS.

], 441S mlleS or ral1road WorKeu Dy twen- ty-one independent companies.
 How to sing a song according to La blanche: "Shut your nose, keep down your tongue, and sound your conso- nants."
 The yearly renewal of telegraph poles requires an amount of lumber nearly equaling the annual product of the State of Maine.
 It is calculated that at the present rate of destruction, the pine forests of this country will be exhausted in thirty to fifty years.
 The Petersburg (Va.) Inder-Ap- peal says that the act of the Confederaoy by which General Butler was outlawed and consigned to the punishment of hanging has never been repealed.
 A German has devised a "Bank Note Album with leaves of Asbestos paper Papers placed betwixt the leaves will, it is said, be legible even after ex- posture to fire which reduces them to cinders.
 In the province of Nassau, Prussia, the common nettle has been treated like hemp, and is found to yield fibre quite as durable and as fine as silk. Factories have consequently been started for its manufacture.
 The Alexandria, Temeraire, and Monarch, ironclads of the British navy, have been provided with electric lights which brilliantly illuminate the sea around them. By this means the ap- proach of torpedoes may be detected.
 The efforts made to get the tallow butter down the throats of the people does not succeed. People do not like it. If they eat butter, they want butter. The tallow butter would be just the thing for the Esquimaux who prefer that kind of eating.
 A young man of 20, at Naples, re- gently got rid of his wife, who was 75 years old, and remarkably ugly, by pushing her off a precipice as she was coming home from the we'll with bucket of water on her head. The jury con- demned him to death.
 Wild chickens numbered by thou s..nds are hunted as wild game in Co., manche county, Texas. A few years ago large number of domestic chickens were deserted for some reason by their owner, when they took to the brush, and the woods arc now full of them.
 The Berlin Housewife's Union seems to have been a great success. It SUD- ports newspaper for the discussion of all housekeeping questions, co-opera- tive store, which supplies 4,000 families, and au agency for servants, which in the past four years has supplied l6, 900 per sons with places.
 Augustus Botto bought two reserved seats for an entertainment in Eureka, Cal, and when he went with his wife to occupy them they were already taken He appealed to the manager, who sad | that he had no time to interfere. "Then give me back two dollars" said Botto The manager not only refused, but shot five bullets into Botto's body, killing him.
 Putting out fire is queer job to let out on contract, but it has been done i'll the case of the burning coal mine near Pittsburgh. The fire has been raging for two months, and the contrac- tor is to get $35, 900 if he extinguishes it before it docs a certain amount of damage. His plan is to dlg deep trench and fill 1t with stones, thus making a barrier.
 It Is estimated that the increased wheat acreage over that of last year is at least 35 per cent. in Wisconsin, Mime ssta, Dakota and northern Iowa, while in all the wheat-growing districts south of the line of Wisconsin the increase is even much larger per cent. The acreage of oats is about the same as last year. There will be very much less bar ley sown.
 A Savannah man pursued his elop- ing daughter, and found her in a hotel with her new husband. She was of age, and therefore he could not force her to return home: but he was the lawful owner of her clothing, and he compelled her to go to her room and take off every shred of it. Then he went back to Sa- vannah with large bundle under his arm, and the women in the hotel con- tributed something for the bride to wear.
 A prominent firm of stovemakers in Albany closes an advertisement with the following bit at the convict stovemakers in our State Prisons "We respectfully solicit the trade of those who prefer a good article, made by honest, skilled, first-class mechanics to the necessarily inferior product of thieves, murderers, and other criminals, whose enforced la- bor is without skill, experience, the in- centive of wages, or the needs of de- pendent family"
 Fanny Mcguire, Q young white girl, eloped from Houston, Texas, with Walker Denning, negro employed by her father. After marriage ceremony they went to live in hut in the negro quarter of the city. The girls conduct was amazing, because she was educated, pretty, and had stood we'll socially. Denning was arrested on the handy charge of carrying concealed weapons, and, while in jail, was shot to death by a mob.
 The editor of Vanity Fair Gon- don) writes: "I am daily assailed by friends who, either on their own account or on account of somebody else, implore me in the name of friendship to keep