The Portland daily press., 1888-11-07
PERSONAL AND PECULIAR,

Lord Tennyson has been for the last
month seriously i'll with rheumatic CONT.
He Is regarded now as convalescent but his
advancing years are telling on him. and ii il
unlikely that he will ever be an entirely we'll
man again
o. j. Brown Of Claremont, well-known
New Hampshire stage driver In the staging
DAYS. celebrated his S0th birthday recently
by driving a load of his friends. drawn bv
eight gray horses, to Windsor, VT, giving
them fine dinner, and driving them back in
excellent style.
1t is believed that the city Of Paris affords
the most successful and remarkable system
OF clocks worked automatically by COM
pressed air, several thousand being carried
on according to this principle from single
central station, the compressed air being
conveyed under the streets by means Of
small pipes.
A jolly and beery listener to Hon. Henry
Cabot Lodge, in Gloucester. Mass, on Sat-
urday evening found the atmosphere OF the
crowded ball too close for him. Waddling
out, he had just reached the centre of the
middle aisle as the speaker enforced his
argument with, Now we will 60 step fur-
ther." "Well, I'm a-going!" was the rol.
llcksome rejoinder Of the departing man
Peal upon peal of laughter accompanied
him.
In the blizzard of last March a good-sized
limb was broken from large elm tree in
front of the residence of DIR. Vile of Dan
bury, Conn. The limb was not severed en-
tirely from the trunk, but hung head down,
supported by the bark on the under side.
When the sap assembled in the spring, this
limb received none, and hung leafless all
has rad 70
and the sap, descending, has entered the
limb, and u Is covered with the soft. green
foliage Of June The rest of the tree Is bare
The branch was bound to have its summer il
it took all winter.
Living on Dovercourt road In Toront0,r
Ont, Is one Of the very few women in the
world. and, probably. the only one in Canada,
who have had silver medal pinned upon
their bosom by Queen Victoria. Mrs. Newton
was all through the Crimean war as nurse
and on that memorable day and night when
when the French captured the Malakoff and
the English assaulted the Redan, she was in
the third trench before the Redan attending
20 the wounded. A yonng soldier was shot
through the body, and Mrs. Newton was in
trench attending to him when she herself
was shot through the knee. On conclusion
Of the war she, with three other ladies. was
given the Crimean medal, the Queen herself
plnning 1t upon them, and in each case saw
ing lew words OF praise and sympathy.
Perhaps the most unlucky ship that was
ever launched from an American shipyard
was the Harvey Mills, which closed her ten
years career of disaster by sinking off Cape
Flattery on the last day of December, 1886.
She was launched on Friday, and was bap-
tized in blood, killing workman when glid-
ing into the sea. Once in the merchant SER
vice she met so many mishaps that the under.
writers actually classed her as an extra haz-
ardous risk. On her first voyage she was all
but lost, and twice she narrowly escaped
laundering. She was on fire once, while
transporting cotton from Port Royal to Liv-
erpool, and was transformed into floating
furnace, Her matches were closed down, en-
abling her to reach New York before the
flames cut through the deck. Later she
rode down and sank bark in the English
Channel, and none of the bark's crew es
capped TO tell their side of the story. On her
next voyage she was dismasted by a hurri-
cane. Twice she was given up for lost, and
when at last she battled uusuccessfully with
the frightful gales off Cape Flattery, twenty
one of the twenty-four unfortunates on
board were engulfed SO quickly when she
sank that they could not even grasp SPAR