Dakota farmers' leader. (Canton, S.D.) 1890-19??, 1907-01-04

while. a month earlier, Deacon French of
Nashua, n. H., at lightweight, married
a %spinster of seventy-six.
''The seventies have even more to tell.
In January, Andrew Lansair of Toledo
cutting another set of teeth in
February Il lie Sueur (Minn.) matron
painted her entire house; in October
Frank Bookwalter, returning to his boy
home in Attica, had the doorstep
lifted that he might find a dime he had
lost down the crack as a boy of five. He
found it. And each of these was just
three score years and ten.
The note of pathos, which so often
sounds with age, came from Middletown,
n. y, in April. Matthew Smedes, aged
q. could no longer resist the call of the
fields. He took to the pillow again-and
was found dead in the first furrow he
had cut died in harness, as he had
to die!
Babes and Divorces. ,
The divorce mill seems to have record
ed a new ''farthest north" A Seattle
separated an even dozen couples in
seventy-five minutes, in February, one
fond husband receiving the
BOON for which he prayed because his wife
become a Shakeress, and another be-
cause his better half had circulated a
that he was an anarchist.
Mrs. Lorenz, on the other hand, re-
ceivsd a divorce in Cincinnati on the
plausible ground that it was difficult to
i've peacefully with a man who insisted
on appearing in the parlor with neither
shoes nsr stockings.
Des Moines produced, in May, a baby
who changed in color three times a day.
When little Eli Rami awakes he is a
proper pink. BY noon he is dark gin
ger in hue and before bedtime is start
Iingly pale. But then he is the son of a
Hindoo father and an Illinois mother.
In August the Hello lady" on the line
Meredith and Wolfboro, n. H.,
heard the voice of a two-hour-old sub
scriber. The news of his arrival in the
world came first, and then his %infantile
Endorsement Travelled across Lake Winni-
pesaukee.
Stranger than Fiction.
That a laborer should discover gold
quartz in New York's Broadway
(March)-that a house out in Butte,
being moved, should run away and
kill a team of horses (September)-that
u ljdLDuIy NSoHh.p younS iauy siouid
lose a locket while skating, only to find it
mex week in the ice in the family refrig-
erator-these are odd enough. But odder
are two tales which the year has brought
from across the Atlantic.
In the one-from Italy-the story is
four merrymakers, running away
in the hills near Lake Como, broke
through the parapet on the edge of the
roac only to land right-side up in a high
tree just below, no one being worse than
frightened.
In the other-Well, Australia may
claim something near the record! At
some amateur theatricals, near Victoria,
in January, two people in the stalls, when-
ever the heroine was kissed, kissed each
loudly. The man of this couple
was husband to the stage heroine, and this
was his way of reproving behavior across
the footlights to which he was distinctly
opposed.
Weird Wills.
When the late Michael Davitt be-
to all his friends kind thoughts,
to my enemies the fullest possible forgive
ness and to Ireland my undying prayer
her absolute freedom" he yet did not
leave the strangest will of the twelve
months probate.
Mrs. Christina Hoch of Brooklyn will
ed the ashes of her body, when cremated,
as fertilizer for a rose bush on her sons
grave; Mrs. Isabel Kreamer, at West
(England), left her cork leg to
the parish poor warden, and a woman of
Florence, Italy, bequeathed $500 to the
staff of a local newspaper lin gratitude
for having been so often entertained by
their writings"
Alphonse Strauss, one of London's mill
ionaire merchants, dying last May. dis
posed of an estate of $1,4S1, 1O5 in just
forty-three words-nearly $4,000 a
word; while January brought sudden
wealth to a poor French girl. who at
tended the sale of a great aunt's effects
to buy in some ,%trifling memento of her.
The only bidder for a shabby old book
Of devotions-she found between it's leaves
a will besrowing upon her the entire
valued at $4,000. g ia
Life's Litt1e Ironies.
If this last was the brighter side of
those little ironies which life shows the
world each year, the darker side appeared
to a sleep-talking farmer of Sibley, Iowa.
He had committed a murder two years
ago, but had never been suspected. Con-
Tossing the crime while asleep, he was
repeated his confession in court,
and was duly sentenced.
In Milwaukee (~February) one Harry
Martens, playing ghost to brighten some
negroes, fell downstairs in the dark
and became a ghost! And a fellow named
Durenne, living near Quebec, in the be-
lief that the rope by which a suicide has
himself will bring a later owner
luck, stole such a rope, only to fall to
his death the next minute through the
rotten flooring of the belfry.
Was it not i%ronical, too, that a mere
fragment of the handwriting of the Eng
fish poet Chatterton should have sold
(October) for S155, and that in the I'M
fortunate versifyer's native town of Bris-
toI. where he died of starvation in his
seventeenth year?
Europe has had many an odd tale to
tell since January was here. Antrim
has produced a man beside whom Pooh
Bah was a laborer of very single aim. For
this busy Irishman is land steward, pier
overseer, port payclerk, game keeper, min
ing superintendent, bog bailiff, ~auctioneer,
real estate agent, supervisor of shipping
and the manager of a private business be-
sides.
Colored rain in the shape of millions
of tiny red, green and yellow insects fell
at Anglers, France, in March, while in
Nantes a young. fellow. Gautier by name.
has murdered his stepfather that his mill
tary service might be a year shorter,
through his being 'the only son Of a
widow"
At one of London's West End clubs a