Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1890-02-06

A L. FoNTAINE, EDrTos md PROP.
GRAND RAPIDS, WISCONSIN.
OKLAHOMA seems to have greater at
fractions for the negro as an emigration
field than the banks of the Congo. There
are already $4,000 colored people there,
and by the middle of spring this number
ill be doubled.
A New JERSEY negro visited a chicken
-souse and grain shed recently and stole
thirty-one chickens, eighteen bushels of
corn, two bags of corn meal, three bags of
rye in the grains That New Jersey far
mer should thank his stars that he was
left the chicken house and grain shed.
EDISON, the inventor, is busily engaged
in pushing forward to completion an cleo
trio moter for street railway cars. His
idea dispenses with the overhead high
tension wires and also with the storage
battery. In few weeks Mr. Edison ex-
poets to give his invention a public trial
on one of the street railroads in Orange.
ADD the Indiana railway horror of the
9th to the list and it makes eleven rail
road accidents in which lives have been
sacrificed since the first Every one of
these have been due to carelessness, and
the browning horror is no exception.
There can be no broken rails where a track
is properly looked after.
THERE is a slowing up on immigra-
ton to this country. The Argentine Repub-
lie and other parts of the world are offering
inducements, so that we are not likely for
some years hence to add a half a million a
year or more to our population by new
Corners from abroad.
THE surprisingly small number of ser
iOus marine disasters attending the recent
long continued gales on the Atlantic speaks
volumes for the virtues of modern ship
building. With even the clipper ships of
fifty years ago-an equally large feet be-
ing exposed-the fatalities would have
reached the thousands Steam has one
great advantage over sails. that it permits
the master to lay his course as he chooses
and to balk a storm in some other way if
he cannot outrun it. There was deal of
poetry in the old days of which Marryatt
and Cooper wrote, but the insurance rates
must have been held rather high on mar
inc or life risks.
WE are now at the foot of the flood
tide, Of social enjoyment. Balls, recep-
tions, dinners, theater parties, suppers,
ETC., now make their severest exactions
upon both young and old, and the multi
piled lists of deaths among all ages and
conditions, pointedly admonishes all of
the grave perils of social life. 1t is not
necessary that the pleasures of social life
should be abandoned; but it il a supreme
necessity that all should appreciate the
peculiar perils which now attend social
pleasures if the usual social customs as to
dress, exposure, ETC.. are accepted. 1t is
no time for dresses which expose persons
to sudden colds, and it is no time to ac-
cept any social invitation if colds, sore
threats, pain in the head, chest or limbs,
however slight, give premoniton of the
prevailing epidemic. In short the present
season makes an imperious call upon the
votaries of social life to adopt the most
sensible and safe apparel and to avoid
severe prostration as the reasonably certain
precursor of dangerous illness. If the I'M
usual infection and the appalling death
lists shall move our social leaders to sem
sible dressing and sensible hours of social
enjoyment it would leave some good
in its fearful sweep of destruction.
1t is simply an absurd afectation that
fixes midnight as the time to see a ball at
its best, and that extends the social pleas
ures on into the early morning hours.
With sensible people nothing can be
plebian that is sensible, to call the usually
lll-clad gotaries of social enjoyment to
meet at eight or nine O'Clock at the latest,
and to make the most fashionable dress
that which, with elegance, would best pro-
tect health. If an association of cultured
young ladies were to resolve upon early
evening balls, health-preserving dress, no
needless expenditure in flowers and the
right to wear modest dresses as often as
circumstance or taste dictated, many more
of our young men would incline to early
marriage.
The New Pork Presbytery has been en-
gagged of late in an exceedingly interestin.
discussion. A special committee made a
report the other day recommending the ex-
ision of five things from the confession