The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1895-09-01
ITEMS or INTEREST.


| constructed Tor tourists TO rlde UP On
mules TO the Funlcular railway.
/ A plan to line the avenue des Champs
I Eiysees with a hundred statues more
/ or less, Of celebrated Frenchmen Is un-
der consideration in Paris. 1t is SAID TO
/ be encOuntering much opposition from
artists ana writer's.
/ 1t is reported that a citizen of Bellows
Falls. VI, recently harnesSed his team
I at a. m, put a load Of pulp wood on
I his wagon and drove to the wood pulp
/ mill without accident, having been an
/ the while fast asleep.
/ "A peculiar blunder occurred in the en-
craving OF the plate from which the re-
/ verse side Of the s. silver certificates
were printed, says an exchange IL VIII
! be noted that on the back Of these GER
/ tiliCates are the faC-similes OF several
| silver dollars. The third one of these from
I the left end OF the certificate mas me
word trust spelled 'trast" On all the
/ others the word is properly spelled.
| France reports 213 centenarians, all ex-
1 cept 50 being women. Tney are generaIly
ahead in the tables Of longevity, a TACT
/ sometimes explained by the superior tram
/ guilty of their lives, but this does not hold
1 good in the case of the women of France.
/ Her decorating and exploding quality Is at
/ least equal to that of the men, If not TO
| the roman candle and the Han-ChoW fre-
| cracker. Her superior average OF dura-
/ tiOn will have to be otherwise accounted
/ for. one of them in the Haute Garonne
I lived 80 years, subsisting during her final
half-century mainly on goats milk. Her
| diet may have had as much to do with her
| long survival as her inherited or acquired
! placidity. Since the days of old PER- there
/ is no other AUTHENTIC instance of suoh
| great longevity, giving France the lead In
| this particular, as well as in the Unusual
number within her boundaries who have
reached and ccmpassed the century.
1t is seldom that man dies In a coffin,
| but that is exactly what old Barney
/ Frickers of Alliance, o. did when he
finally gave up the ghost in the fall Of 1890
1 For more than 20 years "Old Barney had
ed Wi
1 on the verge of the grave. Every evening
/ he declared that he would never again see
1 the sun rise. He constantly brOoded over
/ his queer hallucinauon, and never allow
/ ed himself to so to sleep without being
carefully prepared for death and burial.
/ Every night he robed himself in his grave
clothes and solemnly laid down in his
coffin and passed the night firmly beheY-
4 ing and probably hoping that for him the
/ day would never dawn again. Finally
/ death came, but, grim and sly as ne was,
/ he did not find odd Barney unprepared.
/ The coffin in which this queer old charac-
/ ter had so often awakened disappointed
/ was of his own make, and was said TO nave
! been a curiosity in itself, being literally
/ covered with all kinds, patterns and sizes
/ of categorical carving.
/ From the notebook of a recent traveller
| insAlsace: ION my return from Blechen
| / looked upon the beautiful villages OF the
/ Lewen Valley, and, being tourist VINO
! likes to poke his nose into everything
i turned by chance into the church at
| Kirchberg. on coming out took out my
| watch to regulate it by the clock in the
| church tower. But there was no clock
| to be seen. Hence ] went to the village
| inn and there asked the time, but mine
/ host could not oblige me. You see he
| said we have no use for clocks. In the
morning we go by the smoke rising from
! the chimney at the parsonage up on the
! hill. The parsonage people are very reg
| ular. We dine when dinner is ready. At
! pm. the whistle of the train coming from
| WESTMINSTER tells us that the time has
| come for another meal, and at night we
I . 70 TO Nod Vfaef an
it is dark. on Sundays we go to church
| when the bell rings. Our parson is a
very eaSy-gOing man; he doeSn mlnu
| beginning half an hour sooner or later.
Gutta-percha for insulating has been the
mainstay of the electric engineer but dis
| quietng rumors have been for some time
| prevalent as to the coming failure of the
| supply, says Information. Good news now
| comes from Sarawak NJ. Hourant, a
| French Clutch merchant in that city, has
discovered that gutta-percha can be eX-
| tracted from the dried leaves of the gutta
tree. The old native plan, which threaten
ed to ruin the industry, was to cut down a
tree to obtain the sap. tree 30 years OF
| age would give only one 'catty" of pure
dry gutta; the same quantity is now OBJ
tanned from two pluckings of the leaves.
These pluckings are said not to injure the
| tree, which goes on seeding and reproduce
ing its species. The millions of trees al
| ready cut down, and apparently destroyed
by the native gutta hunters will now
| come into service, as their StumpS have
sprouted out, much as an osier does, and
although the shoots are too small to pro-
duce gutta, their leaves are as good for
| the purpose as those of an adult tree.
Most fshermens nets nowadays are
made by machinery, excepting the small
round crab nets and dip nets, and bait
nets that sportsmen us1; these are made
by hand, for The machines cannot make
anything but a straight, fiat web, says
the New York Sun. Many larger circular
nets, however are constructed from ma
chine-made netting, cut up. Machines
have been used generally in net max
ing for about thirty years. Before that
nets were knitted in the families of the
fishermen. Some fishermen on the Allan
tic coast still make their own nets, and on
one part of the Pacific coast there is a
close union of fishermen using nets made
by hand: but factory made nets have
displaced most nets of domestic make.
| There are six netting factories in the
| United States, all on the Atlantic coast.
| Carload lots of nets are not uncommon
| shipments from this coast to the Pacific,
| and the same is true of netting Irvine.
Nets are made of various sizes of thread
or size, in any size mesh desired, and they
| can be made of any length; but nets of
| certain kinds are made commonly in GER
| tain lengths and then Joined together
| if greater length be desired In this way
| nets have been set in the Great Lakes
| in one straight string of eleven miles; nets
three or four miles long are not uncom-
mon there. Such nets are tished with
! steamboats,. A pound net 100 feet in depth,
| has been set in Lake Superior. 1t was nee
| essary to splice the poles for it. The ave-
| erage depth of pound nets on the lakes
is forty feet; on the Atlantic coast the
average depth of pound nets is thirty
| five feet; leaders are made fifteen to sew
| enty rods in length. In the sounds OF
| North Carolina very long hauling seines
are used, some of them about mile long;
they are operated by steamboats, For
merly, hauling seines were used generally.
| Within the last fifteen years the use of
| pound nets has increased rapidly. Purse
seines are made 200 to $50 fathoms long
and perhaps 100 feet deep. A pound net
| complete, costs $500 to $1,000; a purse net
$500 to $500; a lake gill-net outfit, $1,000 to
i $1,000, although it might not all be used
at one time. There are other kinds of
! nets and seines. The life of a net depends
on the water it is used in and circum-
stances A heavy pound net might get
thrashed out in a season; some nets and
seines last three or four years or longer
Nets are made for various uses other than
| for fishing. They are made for use on
horses, in laundries to hold collars and
cuffs, for decorative purposes, for lawn
tennis, and all sorts of backstops., for
banners and for hammocks for poultry
! yards and for fruit trees and strawberry
beds. Some bird traps are made with
J | nets. There are steamboat nets which
however, are not knotted, but sized
/. @==--=@<~~----~
Awarded