Charlotte messenger. [volume] (Charlotte, Mecklenburg Co., N.C.) 1882-18??, 1888-04-14
SELECT sIFTINes

The first steel pen was made in 1880.
A span is ten and seven-eights inches
Italy signifies country of pitch, from
its yielding great quantities Of blacl
pitch.
A handsome Maltese cat, taken from
Norfolk, Va, to Staunton, travelled back
home, 256 miles, by itself, in q few
weeks.
A Texas paper says that a somnam
bulist went out and hitched up his team
and plowed nearly half an acre before
he woke up.
A hugh black fish over tnirty-five feet
in length was seen in the waters of the
bay near Whatcom, Washington Terri
tory, recently.
Paris is the city of cats. They live in
colonies near the markets and war on
the rats. Lately they have become very
numerous and feroeious.
The present national bank system Of
the United States was organized February
%, 1868, to give uniformity to the paper
currency and the banking laws Of the
country.
Ah IOSO W dACc w 0o AnCOA pOtdtC4 NAt4
England, and the English laws and liber-
ties were granted to its inhabitants. Ire
land was raised to the dignity of king
dom in 1542.
Illinois has law prohibiting the sale
of tobacco in any shape to children
under eighteen years Of age, and the
Mayor of Chicago has set about rigidly
enforcing it.
The relative distances of the sun and
the moon were first calculated, geo.
metrically, by >Aristarchus, who also
maintained the stability of the SUM-.
about $50, B. e.
The fruit of the cherry laurel increases
at the rate of ninety per cent. at night
and cnly ten per cent. by day; while ap-
Piles increases eighty per cent at night
aud twenty per cent. in the daytime.
Had not the wife of an English paper
maker aceidently let blue bag fall into
vat of pulp, blue lard paper, the inven-
ton which brought fortune to the paper
maker, might have still to be invented.
Arthur Schleman, of Sanford, Fla,
killed rattlesnake the other day, and
found in it large rabbit. The animal
had evidently been swallowed only q
short time before, for it was still warm.
A colored man in Anderson county, S.
c., found a live bat in the middle of the
trunk of huge pine tree which he felled.
There was snail cavity in the center of
the tree made there by chipping the pine
when small.
A farmer OF Sumpter county, Ark,
swapped his homestead of 160 acres for
FIVE acres of land, twenty bushels of po-
tatoes, one sow, four pigs, five gallons Of
syrup, four hens, two eggs, and A''es
chew of tobacco.
Samuel Morrison, wEo died in Indian
apolis recently at the age of ninety, was
the Oldest born Indianian. His father
was Revolutionary soldier who settled
on the present site of Aurora. Indiana, in
1898, the year of Samuel Morrison's
birth.
A Buffalo man hung his watch at night
over pan of dough IN the kitchen, and
the next morning it was missing. He Of
course thought it had been stolen, and
was considerably surprised at supper time
to see the lost timepiecs roll out of q loaf
of bread his wife was cutting.
A peculiar feature of Long Lake, in
Wexford County, Michigan, is that it
gradually rises and subsidies once every
few years. 1t has been rising for the past
four or five years, and the Grand Rapids
& Indiana Railway has been obliged to
abandon its old railway along the shore.
Jim Roberts, of Hartwell, Georgia,
owns a rooster which swelled up to an
unnatural size the other day. Out Of
curiosity Jim punctured the fowls skin
with alpenknife to find out if its great
bulk were due to air beneath the skin.
The roo.ter at once collapsed to its nor
NAL size and is now all right.