Morning journal and courier., 1885-03-17

by General Pesquerias, who was much amused to see the savages use blankets as 8 shield against the soldiers bullets. Holding up blanket at both ends, so that the edge just touched the ground, the Indian ridemen marched boldly toward him behind this ap parently fimsy protection. The Mexican general was soon alarmed, however, to find that his bullets did not stop the strange ad- vance, and the moving fort of blankets soon came so close to him and poured in such a deadly fire that he was fain to fly the field in confusion and with great loss. The Yaquis had become acquainted with the simple fact that while bullet will pass through twenty blankets strained over frame or laid against firm surface, it will not penetrate 6 single one if moistened and hung up as to swing clear of the ground. The bullets which Gen. eral Pesquerias imagined were passing through the Indian blankets and thinning the ranks of the savages were all falling harmlessly on the outside of the woolen bull warks.
 The latest achievement of the French jury is the acquittal of man guilty of an attempt
  so badly made that it would not shoot straight. The most curious part of the case was the evidence of the man who sold the weapon, who deposed that he kept an as sortment of defective arms especially to sell to people who meant to injure themselves and others with them. The case very plain and simple one. A fellow called Lalone i,, ixyata aSv111In want rOiSa- lessly behind Mathieu, the chief attendant, aimed at his head and fired. Fortunately a third attendant, who saw the affair, rushed up in time to turn aside the assassin's arm and the bullet was lodged in the ceiling But the gunsmith who sold the revolver to Lalone, being called by the prisoners coun- sel said that no harm would have been done not interfered He then went on to state that he had stock of inoffensive arms and ammunition; pasteboard daggers, pistols with crooked barrels and cartridges with only half dozen grains of powder in them. T am a good physiognomist, he went on. "When a customer calls examine him; if notice marks of evil design in his eyes, either
 
 ly. That is how I proceeded with Lalone. With the revolver I sold him he could not kill chicken firing point-blank."
 On his recent trip through Asiatic Turkey Dr. William Hayes Ward was much inn pressed with the extent and potency of the influence of the American missionaries. It is not their converts only whom they are converting, he wrote from Midhgat to the Independent, but the whole community; "they are the great, and, I may say, the only power at work to ciyiiize the land" In Bull garia and eastern Roumelia he had every where found graduates of Robert college, all full of American ideas, all speaking English, many of them occupying the very highest public positions. Outside of Constantinople, English is now much more commonly spoken by the natives than French-thanks to the American missionaries. Much more is known about America than about England, and there is a great desire, especially among the ambitious young men, to go to a country which is to their imagination ''the land of all good things" The mission schools are crowded. The mission buildings set the fashion in architecture Roomy houses out side the city walls, window glass, chairs, ta- bles and bureaus, potatoes and tomatoes, western dress-all these and other novelties have been introduced by the missionaries. The priests of the Armenian and other an cient churches are patterning after them in their preaching and their parish work. The Turkish officials the best of terms with them. What Dr. Ward saw convinces him that whatever is done for the education and Christianizing of Turkey must be done by American Protestants.