The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-11-15

Boston aspiration is boundless. A society intended to encourage "hfgher artistic standards has been incorpo- rated in that city. Ad astra!
 The nine-year-old boy arrested for setting fire to the Childrens home in Jersey City admitted he did it because he wanted to call out the engines.
 An English writer explains how some sham antiquities are made. A Pom- peiian tile selling for s2 is evolved from a medicine bottle costing less than a penny, and steel files are melted and hammered into Venetian daggers. The final operation Is to sprinkle them with nitric acid to give an ancient appear ance.
 An illustration of German architec- tural and business solidity is afforded by the fact that in Nuremburg there, are houses still in good order which were erected in 10S0, and that in the same town a firm has been engaged Tn manufacturing harmonicas since 1850, sixty years before the settlement in New England.
 The report of the British postmaster general for the past year shows that even the English are careless. It ap- pears that the English returned letter offce' found e643,171, or s3,215,S55, in the undelivered letters that it was forc- ed to open. Nor is that the worst of it. There actually were $23, ,460 enclosed in letters that had not any address at all.
 Some years ago the men of a Bava- rian regiment, of which Prince Maxi milan was chief, in order that they might show their devotion to him, cut off their mustaches and sent them to the princess, who had just become a mother, that she might use them as a pillow. Something very like a repet1- tion of this has just taken place at Rappoltsweiler, in Alsatia. The chief of the fire brigade was few days ago presented with his first child--a boy. The firemen thereupon called a. meet ing. at which it was decided to make the baby boy an honorary member of the corps, and the men subsequently, cut off their mustaches and boards to form a stuffing of red-velvet pillow for the baby's use.
 It is now said that a famous singer made the first move toward the estab- fishing of private railroad carriages. In 1851, when Jenny Lind was married fin America, she was very much an- noyed during her honeymoon by the in- trusion of impertinent interviewers, and, to escape the infliction, she had a passenger car cleared of it's seats and fitted up as drawing room. Tn this she was able to stop at secluded points
 
 or go from place to place without mo- lestation. The idea was quite original with the great singer and attracted so much attention that other people of luxurious taste wanted to initiate her method. The fashion did not spread very rapidly, but it got a start then, and has evolved slowly into the devel- opment of the palace car and dining car now so universally liked.
 The Russian naval department is said to have signed a contract with a Swedish salvage company for the rais- ing of the battleship Gangut, which went down in seventeen fathoms of water after firing practice in the Gulf of Finland. The price to be paid is put at 950,O00 rubles. Soon after the dis aster, which occurred three months ago, it was reported that the battle ship was half buried in the oozy bed of the gulf. In consequence of this affair, a naval commission, sitting at Kronstadt, has decided that future bat tleships built in Russia shall be tested very severely as to the efficiency of their water-tight bulkheads. In the case of the Gangut several bulkheads burst away bodily under the pressure of water, while most of them leaked more or less considerably. The test to be applied in future is to fill the completed apartments with water tC the top. This decision is regarded as 6 practical confession of the truth ot charges made at the time, that tht workmanship on the Gangut was ex cessively bad, and that there had beer criminal economy of material in part: not easily accessible. The economy, O course, was not intended by the gov ernment, which pays dearly for it work, but by officials who could prof by cheap labor and lighter materia 1p the building of first-class battle