The Virginia enterprise. [volume] (Virginia, St. Louis County, Minn.) 1893-19??, 1896-06-26

On the line aud thumped With care.
With towel for Il turhan,
Up the ladder see her climb;
For In homes remote and urban
1t Is now house cleaning time
In this hour Of renovation
Miss Columbia should not pause
Ger the musty legislation
Waiting to be turned to laws.
Often have her thrift and hustle
Been the wonder of each cline.
Good Columbia, prythee hustle:
1t is now housekeeping time.
Washington Star.
Ducks Drown an Eagle.
If Il writer is to be believed the crow
duck is most extraordinary bird OH the
to make even a naturalist gasp
Pour years ago." he writes, "while
shooting ducks With Mr.. Waller Presi-
dent Cleveland's duck blind builder),
noticed flock of three or four thou
sand crow ducks. After half an hour
| noticed an eagle going toward the
ticck. When he arrived at the proper
distance he made dart, but the ducks,
as if by magic. went under water like a
flash and sent up a volume of water
rs if a big mine had been exploded This
was done time and time again, and
finally the volume of water thrown up
drowned An old QUICKER once told me
that he once witnessed the same scene
and that the eagle was drowned. This
is Il sight seldom seen, which may occur
but once in Il ducking life of fifty years.
This crow duck is also known as the
American coot, mud hen, blue peter and
fulic@, Americana by various hunters
and alongshore people. Up North here
these ducks may be seen in creeks and
marshy, reed-grown rivers, but South, in
Florida, they resort in enormous num-
bers to the lakes where bonnets or yell
low lilies abound, associating there with
lesser scaup ducks. They are, shy birds,
localities where shooting is prohibited,
near the Titusville, Fla, railroad pier
for instance, they are as tame as spar
rows, understanding that they are safe"
The nearest anybody ever came to the
drowning eagle story was Frank NJ
Chapman, in his Birds of Eastern
alarmed they patter over the water, us
ing their feet as much as their wings.
The sound produced is characteristic
one.' He does not say whether the
water flies or not, but one could imagine
that a crow duck just as it turned up to
dive could give it's scalloped webbed feet
kick up behind, like Il vicious mule, and
so saturating the eagle that it would
be drowned. Eagles often catch living
fish out of the water, and, of course,
get more or less wet in doing so, but per-
haps the Potomac river eagles are OF
different species than those known to
bird books.-American Field.
Heat rs it is in Australia,
A letter from a man living OH the bor-
ders of New South Wales, about 800
miles from Broken Hill, gives some par
ticulars of the terrible effects of the
heat wave that recently passed over the
colony. The record for the week ended
january 20 is given as ia 116, III, 119,
115 and 12O degrees. I'VE are all done
up" he wrote subsequently; ''thermom-
we can hang it! We have had many sad
deaths among other our poor gardener.
| heard he was i'll and ran down to his
hut, to find him lying insensible The
manager and l did all we could for an
hour, but l saw it was hopeless from
the first. He died at nightfall. We
dared not wait to make, a coffin; indeed,
the exertion of digging his grave was as
much as we could do, so we laid him in
the earth in his 'bluey,' with sheet of
galvanized iron off the roof under him
and another over him. We could not
even read Il prayer, as it was dark and
too far to go for book and light and re-
turn. The sheep are dying by thousands:
horses are knocked up for want of wa
ter; the mail coach cannot run, and we
have to depend on a camel or two that
are being sent So c. and l have
determined to start to walk to Broken
Hill, as if we wait longer we may not
have the strength. Many squatters here
are quite ruined, the millions of rabbits
finished their ruin. Even the blacks
have prickly heat. fact hitherto un-
known Post.
New Use for a Donkey.
1t may not be generally known that
Tom and Jerry are good for whooping
cough. There are hundreds of mothers,
however, who say this is the case.
Tom and Jerry is not a new kind of
patent medicine, but only two gray, long
cared pet donkeys attached to the Cen
trail Park menagerie.
The method employed to cure the little
ones dates back to the early days of
Jerusalem. Keeper Holmes, who looks
after Tom and Jerry, has been kept
quite busy lately curing whoopng
coughs. His method is this:
He stands on one side of the donkey
and passes the infant under the donkey
to it's mother, and then she passes it
back over the donkey. This is done
three times, and then the child is sent
on its way home rejoicing.
Keeper Holmes has cured thousands CT
cases Of whooping cough in this manner
Not one of the children that has gone
through this process has ever died from
that disease
Holmes has cured as many as twenty.
five cases in one day. Yesterday a
young woman brought her baby to be
cured, and asked Mr.. Holmes if he didn't
remember her He said he did not, and
then she told him that he and an old
black donkey had cured her twenty
years ago.-New York World.
Gold in Mojave Desert.
A remarkable story of a rich mining
discovery comes from the Mojave desert