The Lambertville record. [volume] (Lambertville, N.J.) 1872-1968, 1888-02-29
STRAY BITS.


During the last sixteen years $4,000 sailors
ON British ships have been lost at sea.
The business of the London postof1ice is of
such magnitude that the present postmaster
general has saved $4,000 year in sealing
wax and Irvine expenses alone.
The little farm house in which Horace
Greeley was born, together with 1919 acres of
farm land, is to be sold at auction at Am
herst, n H., for taxes amounting to S9o.25.
An eastern man of figures says that an
average of 900 people are drowned through
the ice in the United States every winter
and an average of 5000 are drowned by ac-
cident in the summer.
A steel steamboat, to cost $50, 900, is being
constructed to run on the upper Mississippi
the expectation being that it will make the
trip from st. Louis to st. Paul in half the
time required by the existing wooden craft
Electricity has done much for civilization,
but its possibilities, it seems, have not been
exhausted. An ''electric birchn has been in
vented, by which refractory school pupils
can be punished TO a nicely and no marks be
left.
An Ann Arbor student suspected that some
one was stealing his coal. He loaded one of
the humps with charge of gunpowder, and
the next morning his landladys stove blew
up and his breakfast executed a beautiful
fresco design on the kitchen ceiling
"Weight sociablesr are the latest craze at
Yankton. The gentlemen pick their ladies,
take them to the scales weigh them, pay q
quarter OF cent pound into the general
fund, and then escort them to supper. The
latter costs not far from six bits pound.
Professor Malcomson, of Dallas, Tex, who
is said to be a teacher of some learning, adj
vances the theory that the earth is fat and
also motionless, neither rotating ON its axis
nor revolving around the sun. He also be-
lieves that the sun and moon are smaller than
the earth, and that the light of the moon is
her own and not reflected from the sun.
A funeral procession which started for the
cemetery at Fremont, N. Y, encountered
snow drifts SO deep that it couldn't proceed.
The remains were placed in blacksmith
shop near by and the mourners and friends
set TO work with shovels. The work was not
finished till the following evening, when the
corpse was buried by the light of lanterns.
The scale bug is the pest of California. 1t
Confines its ravages to orange groves. 1t
feeds on the leaves and burrows in the ten
curls up, shrivels, and the tree dies within a
short time. A prominent St Louis manu-
facturer recently invested $4,000 in an
orange grove near Los Angeles which suf-
fered from the blight and had to be sold at a
heavy loss.
Enoch Robinson, for more than half a cent
ury dealer in locks in Boston, has just died
at his curious residence, known as the Round
house. The building, as its name indicates
Is circular in form, and has three stories, the
third story being of smaller diameter than
the others. The interior arrangements are
| in keeping with the exterior, there being cir.
cular stairways, entries, rooms, tables, etc.
In profusion.
| Every man when he takes up his cards al
| game of whist holds one out of 635, 013, 500,
900 possible hands. As for the total number
OF variations possible among all the players
| 1t Is SO enormous as almost to exceed belief
Mr.. Babbage calculated that IL 100000 Of
men were TO be engaged dealing cards at tbs
! rate Of one deal each minute, day and night
for 100,000,OO0 OF years, they would not ther
have exhausted all the possible variations Of
the cards, but only 1o0,oO0th part Of them