Morning journal and courier., 1880-12-10
Hats i'm Church.

10 all W6arerS or SILK natS when once they get inside the church, the hat becomes ser ious difficulty. Of all the expedients by which ingenious churchgoers have endeavored to safely dispose of their hats, there is no one that has not proved to be fallacious. The extreme danger of placing hat in tie aisle immediately outside the pew is universally known. The first lady that sweeps up the aisle carries with her confused mass of de- fenseless hats, which are deposited in the shape of terminal moraine in the front of the pew which is her final goal. Of course the hats which have been subjected to this process are reduced by attrition to a rounded form and covered with scratches, re- minding one of the marks of glacial action on granite boulders. However interesting they may be to the geologist, they are of no further value as hats and can rarely be bent into a shape that will allow their owners to wear them home. In the days when expan- sive crinolines were in fashion the fate of the hat deposited in the aisle was still more appalling. When wel-dressed lady passed by in it's vicinity it disappeared totally from human sight. There are cases on record where one fashionable woman had thus caus- ed the disappearance of thirteen separate hats during her passage from the church door to the pew in the neighborhood of the pulpit. What was the final fate of those hats was never ascertained. They simply vanished and left no trace behind. AS to putting ones hat on the floor underneath the seat no man who follows this reckless course can expect anything but disaster If there is small boy in the pew he will infallibly discover that hat and kick it to the further end of the pew within the first thirty minutes of the service If there is lady in the pew surgical opera tion will be required to remove her boot from the interior of the hat, while in any event the hat is certain to absorb every par ticle of dust within radius of eight feet and to fasten itself to the floor with the aid of
 
 under the seat, on the seat, nor in the aisle can the worried hat find rest, and the plan of establishing a hat pound in the vestibule where hats can be ticketed and kept during service would simply result in converting church into hat exchange where the sin ners would secure all the good hats and the saints would be compelled to content them selves with worn-out and worthless ones.
 Marsh Picture.
 [Frcm Miss Fletcher's Novel, 'The Head of
 Medusa'I
 They were entering the marsh A paved road stretches straight and white across 1t. The blue-green reeds rose straight and sharp, like an army of spears, as far as the eye could see. At the first glance the plain pre- scented the aspect of solid field of rushes; looking more closely, one was aware of open ings in this greenness,-the sunlight glitter ed upon the water, and the mind realized with shock that all this thick-set show of vsrdure is in fact the merest covering for the lagoon. Denuded of vegetation, the stagno would be desolate in its pestilential luxur- ance it becomes terrible The hidden water suggests treachery. In the midday silence there are inexplicable disturbances, quick, sudden darting and struggling deep down under the cover of rushes,-dumb indications of strange and repulsive forms of ife,-the life of slime and obscurity and secrecy. The mind follows these furtive movements with
 
 dies of lower creations, s,-wild, crippled sea- birds dragging themselves painfully about under shelter,-ferce battle for existence between snake and frog and newt.
 At midday this expression of crowded sterility is at its highest. In the morning there are mists hanging about the horizon; at sunset winter exhalation rises slowly, the chill forerunner of fever and slow death darkness covers it at night the stars reflect ed in a thousand motionless pools. But at midday the marsh asserts itself. In the per fectly clear air the straight reeds glitter like sword blades with pitiless distinctness The sea is silenced. The dim sunlight press es heavily down upon an absolutely change less form of dssolation. In the winter these reeds will be stiff and dry, blanched and rattling in the restless sea wind. All the power of summer can only modify their color to barren bloom. In a hundred years the marsh will not be altered by an inch. The whole character of the waste implies immu- tability The handful of peasants, half naked and silent, toiling along that sand bank to the right, are workers in salt mines found cd by Marcus Antonius twenty five centuries ago. That blanched and solitary tower is the campanile Dante chose as resting place for weary shades waiting to be ferried over to the melancholy shores of Purgatory. The hoarse lugubrious croaking of the frogs rises eternally like the malign rejoicing of all the lower powers of evil over this barren full fillment of some primeval curse.
 The project of forming a new town from parts of Brooklyn and Killingly is being &C., lively worked up by citizens of those towns.
 Two hundred dead ducks were recently counted on the shore at Stony Creek, left by sportsmen who did not take the trouble to pick them up.
 DanielsonviIle has instructed it's Senator and Representative to use their influence to have the county seat of Windham removed there from Brooklyn.