St. Landry democrat. (Opelousas, La.) 1878-1894, 1893-09-16
SOMEWHAT STRANGE.
ACCIDENTS AND INCIDENTS OF
EVERYDAY LIFE.

Queer Facts and Thrilling Adven-
lures Which Show That truth is
Stranger Than Fiction.
Two young men of Boston while on q
journey Though India last summer, wit
messed an exhibition by fakir in small
village outside of Calcutta. The faklr
was performing the usual experiment of
making rope descend from the clouds
and a man come down the rope, who
assembled by the same route after having
his head cut off. The exhibition was in
an open square before 200 spectators.
Everyone saw plainly what was happen
ing. The two Bostonians had cameras
with them, and took numerous snap
shots of the exhibition in its various
stages. They intended to write an ar
tlcle upon the sub ect for magazine,
and illustrate it direct from photographs.
They developed the plates with much
interest upon their return to Boston re-
Gently. They were nonplussed when they
saw the results. The photographs re-
vealed the fakir surrounded by the
crowd, with establishment, bewilderment
and horror pictured on their faces, but
the extraordinary decapitation they had
witnessed did not show upon the sensi-
tive plates. The crowd standing around
was apparently looking at nothing in the
photographs. What they saw had not
happened at all, but they merely saw it
in their minds eye. While there is
nothing remarkable in the force of sug-
gestion when applied to one person, and
1t would not be impossible for an i'm
preston such as the event which the
Boston men saw, to be conveyed to one
person in hypnotic condition, the cir
cumstances at the Indian fakir's exhibit
ton were entirely different. Here were
1000 people, fully awake, who all saw
in their minds exactly the same picture,
and had no doubts that the wonderful
events actually happened. An incident
of this kind tends to make one begin to
consider. if he has not done so before, if
it is not possible for certain influences to
so strongly impress the mind that We
may, even while clinging to the old
theory, "seeing is believing" be hon
estly deceived, yet what we sec may be
SC, real that the thought of its being any
thing else never enters our mind. It was
so in the case of the Bostonians.
AN anecdote has been going the rounds
of the newspapers of a man who, on
breaking open an old relic, came upon
some unexpected records of his progeni-
tors. This is nothing to what really
happened few years ago to Mr.. w. P.
Cakes, of Foxcroft, one of the best known
of Maine land surveyors, and the de-
scendant of land surveying ancestry.
He was employed to find, if he could,
the true line between Willimantic and
Bowerbank townships in the Maine
woods, where there was strip of land
half mile wide which had been so often
surveyed with varying results, that
spotted trees were more numerous on it
than unspotted ones One end of the
disputed line was in the middle of Sebec
Lake. The other end was somewhere
among the lodges of the mountain range.
Under these conditions, to find the orig
inal corner tree was, as the boy said, 'no
fool of a job" Mr.. Cakes took long
start back where the line was we'll estab-
lished and surveyed over the mountains.
He did this several times, finding such
natural obstacles in the way that correct
results were far from easy to get. He
had nearly given up the task as hope
less one, when by accident almost, in a
down tree, which had once stood on a
steep, rocky knoll, he found the coveted
marks. Chopping off the oVergrowth
from the ancient spots, he uncovered
smooth surface as clean and bright as if
newly cut, on which was written the sur
veyor's record in plain hand, stating
that it was the corner tree between the
two townships as surveyed in 1894, Civ
ing the date. This was signed by Samuel
Weston, Stephen Weston, William
Cakes, and John Cakes, who composed
the surveying party. William Cakes
was the grandfather of the finder of the
tree, and John Cakes was his granduncle,
and this was the first time the grandson
had ever seen the handwriting of either
of them.
TIE offense known in this country as
or private Imprisonment,
Is far from uncommon, says Paris letter. |
Only the other day a whole family was
brought up for trial on charge of keep
ing an idiot youth i'll an iron cage until |
he had lost all his physical as well as
mental faculties. and a similar case is
now reported from Evreux, in Normandy.
The authorities of the village of Neu-
bourg were advised recently by an
letter that a peasant named
Lehuby was "sequestrating" his wife.
The gendarmes presented themselves at
Lehuby's house and asked to see his wife.
This request being refused, they pro-
,eeded to search the place from the Gel
ar to the granary, and having found no |
race of the woman were about to with
lraw when one of them discovered
arge trunk and asked for the key. On
he case being opened the figure of Nine.
Lehuby suddenly jumped up like Jack
n the Box, and she explained to the
rendartnes that her husband would not
lllow her to go out, and whenever he
eft the house he left her locked up in
he box, where she could scarcely
breathe. Lehuby was*at once arrested,
md will be tried for "amateur imprison-
nent." /
AN unmarried woman possessed of
considerable wealth who died recently
n town in Pennsylvania was buried in
grave that was dug nineteen years ago.
Her father was buried in it originally,
md after two years his body was ex-
lumed and placed in vault 1t was
principle of the family never to spend
money uselessly, and the daughter, real
zing that she herself would need grave
ome time, decided that filing up the
grave would be waste of good money,
md gave orders that it be kept open for