THE PINE KNOT.
SOUTHERN PINES. N. C.
Skin from the back of a frog has been
iiscd by Dr. O. Peterson for hastening '
. . . . !
the healing of wounds. Grafts of the
size of the thumbnail were, caused to ad
here firmly in two days, and in two days
more the pigmentation of the transplant
ed skin had almost disappeared. The'
resulting cicatrice is of great softness
and elasticity. Some of the London hos
pitals are now beginning o employ
frogs' skins as grafts in place of other
skin. .') '.) . .
A physician says that a great deal ol
wuui pabsqs lor ucarc uiseases on y liuiu
dyspepsia; that nervousness is-commonly
bad temper, and that two:ttiirds of the
so-called malaria is nothing but laziness.
Imagination, he says, is responsible for a
multitude of ills, and he jrives as
an in-
stance the case of a clergyman,
who,
after preaching a sermon, would take a;
teaspoonful of sweetened water, and doze
off like a babe, under the impression that
it was a bona fide sedative.
. Census figures reveal the -strange fact;
that'of the European countrieRussia is
increasing the fastest in population. Her
average gam for Russia in Asia and in
Europe appears to be very I nearly one
per cent, per annum, while European
Russia, including Finland and the Don
Copacks, shows an annual . increase of
1.38 per cent. In Great Britain and
Ireland the annual rate of gain is about
1.01 per cent. probablv not much of
it, howeVtr, in Ireland. France1! shows
a yearly gain of only a seventh of .1 per
cent, i In France the increase appears to
be the least of a! I European countries.
; Some of the more enterprising of the
Western railroads run daily "funeral
trains," The Chicago cemeteries are at
a considerable distance from the citv,
and enough people die every day to justi
fy special daily trains. In the Chicago
papers. may be seen such advertisements
as this under , the head of "Deaths."
'jTake the Chicago and Grand Trunk
Railroad to Mt. Greenwood and Mt.
Olivet. Special funeral train at 12 m.
Fastest time to the cemeteries." Verily,
the West is a husiler, comments the New
York Graphic. The grave is prepared
by telegraph and the deceased slips down
a chute to his las t resting-place, while
the "mourners" turn and run to catch
tne next train back.
An English agricultural journal gives
some attention to cattle ranching and its
results on our western plains. It ap
pears that there are eleven large English
companies, which own 672, 013 head, and
own and lease, in all, 3,319,072 acres of
land.; The Prairie Company, organized
in Edinburgh about five years ago, has a
capital of over a million dollars, owns
about 125,000 cattle. . Its dividends
were 20 1-2 per cent in 1883, and 10 per
cent in 1884 and 1885, very satisfactory,
no doubt to British capital. The tend
ency is, however, to smaller profits, as;
the cattle-grazing territory is becoming
overstocked, and prices ,aro declining.
American companies, to keep up divi
dends, make forced sales, and thus keep
up wasteful competition. While jthe
great grazing companies are not meeting
their expectations, such stallrfeedingj as
is practiced on the farms of the Midjdle
and Northwestern States continues the
most profitable kind of husbandry com
monly practiced, much more so than tha
taisincr of cereals for maiket. J
, .-. ;
Tiie first female clerk eknpioyed toy
the Government was Miss Jennie
j .ouglass, appointed to the Treasury
Department by Spinner in 1862. j
- Trance has jt opened her eves
to
the fact that she has o6,000 bliud x beg
A MAIL CAR.
Distributing Postofflce Mat
ter in a Flying Train.
ow uncle bams Hired Men: m tne
Kail way Service Assort the Mail.
Chicago
Herald, reporter has been
making a trip Jwith the six postal clerks
who distribute the mail from a tram
which leaves j the "Western metropolis
daily. :" "We quote; froni the reporter's ac
count: j - , '
What do the clerks find to do ? A
plenty. Every morning they take but
about twenty-fivej tons of mail, andjon
Saturday thirty or thirty -five tons. This
mail" is composed of letters postal carjls.
single newspapers and
newspapers
in bunches. The
"worked," that
most of i. must . be
is, assorted and dis-
tributed according, to address
In one end
of the car are two bier cases, each
con
taining hundreds of pigeon holes. Each,
pigeon-hole represents either a post office
or a railway mail car, which is a moving
pkt office. Head Clerk Kemper, for in
stlance', picks up a bunch of letters. In
that bunch there may be
i
missives for
fifty post offices in a dozen states or ter
ritories. He must know ju;t where every
letter goes in his case, and to know that
simply means that he must be familiar
with the. entire postal route system in the
staes, for which he is expected to make
distribution. Ini Illinois, for instance,
there are . 1700 post offices. The clerk
must not only j know in what county every
one is situated but on what line of rail
road or stage, land how it is served. He
must, in fact, be able to draw a map of
Illinois and place thereon all the rail
roads, stage routes and. post offices, j So,
as Clerk Kemper ) takes up bunch after
bunch, . addressed to thousands of offices
in a half dozen states, his mind as well
as his fingers; must be nimble. A printer's
case, with its three alphabets and few
dozen characters, ; is virtuallv an A B C
i I -
book compared to the post office gaze
teer which the. j clerk is compelled to
carry in his brain, and make demands
upon a hundred times a minute. He
keeps on assorting and throwing, with
the postal system' of a great deal of the
Northwest in his mind,' and with the
train still hurrying on to its destination.
In the other; end of the car four men
are standing before long rows of news
paper sacks hanging with their mouths
open. There are a hundred; of ' these
sacks, and above; them, where the births
are 'closed during the day in a Pullman
car, are fifty boxes. Into these sacks
and boxes the four riren' fire newspapers
as if they were I shooting ; at rats and
their daily bread depending upon the
number they could kill.
Two clerks thus work on letters and
four on newspapers. Just before a town
pr junction point is reached each man
gathers together jail of the mail he has
for the town' or for the" connecting lines,
the whole is bunched into a bar and the
bag locked and thrown off. The news
papers are sacked loose, but the letters
and postal cards; arc tied into packages
and addressed by means of a slip, and o.i
this slip each clerk must stamp his
name and the date. .The postmaster or
railway mail clerk into whose hands this
package comes for another distribution!
--'it .-'
must mark upon jthe slip the number of
errors which he j may find. If, for in
stancef there are let'ers in a package ad
dressed to the ,"Buda & Yates Citv R.
P.
been
O.
which
. ! bv
should
v mail
nave
sent
by
some other railway postoflice, every such
V ... - : -i ' -i fi " -y. ' ,
letter is an error, and after. scoring them
' . i i . . ,
all up the postmaster or clerk maus tne
slip to Captain White, superintendent.
In one run from Chicago to Burlington a
clerk will handle from two ' hundred to
two hundred! land fifty packages of let-
ters or cards, or more than ten thousand
pieces in all. These may represent foul
or five thousand postoffices, and to do
the work at all the clerk must lose no
time in consulting his books or in scratch-ino-
his head. Yet it is not often that
the overworked public servant will make
more than fifty errors a week. At head
quarters tab is kepand the poor clerk
who makes a good many errors one week
wants 'to look sharp that he doesn't re
neat the offense soon or off mav come his
head.
i v "
Sugar Plantation in Cuba.
Dr. E. M. Hall describes, in a letter to j
the Inter-Ocean, a sugar plantation, the
Toledo, near the seacoast town of 3Iari
anao, a bathing place much resorted to
in the summer by the Ilavanese. The
sugar factory, he says, is about three
miles from the railroad station. A ride
through an undulating country a lime
stone formation the road .rough, and in
many places cut through the rock. The
stone walls reminded one of New Eng
land, but the royal palm and cocoanut
trees did not. The former is very absurd-looking,
with varying shapes. Im
agine a palmetto,, for it jis of the same
species, but instead of being uniform in
size, it is sometimes larger, in the middle,
swelling I out twice as large below oi
above. In other instances the largest
portion is near the ground. Others look
like a gigantic carrot, with the point in
the ground. Then the gray trunk at
about six feet from tbe top suddenly be
comes smaller and of a smooth, bright
green, as round and polished as possible
to conceive. Just at the juncture of the
green and gray there projects at ri
rrM
angles a brush of red and
green
flowers. .
At the mill we witnessed the whole
process of making sugar, from the grind
ing of the cane to the coarse brown gran
ulated sugar, which was packed hard in
bags to be shipped to New York to be
refined. This sells for two Or three cents
per pound. No money is made in sugar
making now, and some years it is even
made at a loss. At dinner I tried "the
wine most in use in; Spain, the Vat de
Penas. It is rough, strong wine, and
tastes well, my daughter was informed
in Spain that it is put up
in hog skins instead of bar
rels, and thus brought to the market,
fter this explanation, no one need
doubt how it tastes. Yet the Spaniards
consider this peculiar taste to be a great
recommendation. ' Just as the ; Greeks
perfer the wine put up in cedar casks, or
the Scotch the smoky taste of their own
whisky. j -
Floors of Glass.
Glass floorings is being
increasingly
substituted for boards in Paris, this be
ing especially the case in those business
structures where the cellars are used as
offices. At the bank cf the Credit Lyon
naise the whole of the ground in front is
paved with large squares Of roughened
glass embeded m a j strong iron frame,
and in the Cellars beneath there U suffi
cient light, even oh dull days, to enable
clerks to work without gas.' Althouah
its prime cost is much greater than that
cf boards, glass is in the long run far
cheaper, owing to its almost unlimited
durability.
Origin of Agriculture.
M. Koth, before the British Anthro
pological Society, gave it as his opinion
that agriculture grew out of the lazinesi
of woman in primitive times, when it was
her duty to collect vegetable food.
"They would cut off the useless parts ol
" ' , , . ,
l iially discover that I the rejected part?
; , ,J , i , , , J 1
i loft on the ground produced new crops,
i , ,., , 1 , , .
In like .manner the sowing of seed might
j have been learned by the accidental
! scattering of seeds when the women were
! bringing home food of the nature ol
' jrruin."
I A Russian convict is said to have
sur
vived a punishment of lasnes.
1 It is estimated that the aggregate
weight of the diamonds taken from the
South African fields up to the present
time is six and one half tons, of the totalL
value of $200, 000, 000.
' 0ne of the natural freaks of South Af
rica is a bug , which on .being touched-
emits a perfume, and two: or three oi
which carried in, a wagon ; will scent H.
delightfully for weeks.
The churches in Venzuela and in all
Spanish America are usually without
seats, except perhaps a few ... such long ;
ones as we see in parks, ranged up and
down the centre of the church
length-
wise. . - ' '
An ordinary beetle can draw twenty
times the weight of the body, and a.
larcre homed beetle, which Jwas carefully
weighed land allowed to work unmolest
ed beneath a bell glass, drew 42 2-10 '
times its own weight. "
The old Roman custom or law that an
enemy who had come to another country, .
even in times of peace, could, if war
broke out, be enslaved, existed in Eu
rope in the middle ages; and the " en
slavement did not cease till the middle
of the seventeenth qentury. .
Henry II. of England, the father of "
Richard the Lion Hearted,, was wont to
travel so fast that the King of France,
1 who was rather lazy, said: 4,He neither
rides on land nor sails oh water, but flies
through the air like a bird." He went
through'the country, as kings of old used .
to do, examining into ; affairs,' and -especially
as to how, the judges used to -do
their duty. j j
The Hindoos say that chess is the in-
vention of an astrologer who lived more
than 5,000 years ago and was possessed 1
of supernatural knowlege and acuteness. .
Greek historians assert that the game was
invented by Palamedes to beguile in the '
tedium of the siege of Troy. The Arab
legend is that it was devised for the in- -struction
of a young despot' by his father,.,
a learned Brahmin, to teach the youth
that a king, no matter how powerful,
was dependent upon his subjects foi .
safety. '
Origin of the Dollar.
The origin of our word
dollar, aa
everybody knows, is from the German Y
thaler or low German daler. But 'the
way in which it came to mean a coin is :
not familiar. About the end of the ..
fifteenth century the count of Schlick
Joachim's Thai (Joachim's Valley), into, '
ounce-pieces, which got to be called
j Joachim's thaler, the German adjective
jfrom the name of the place. These pieces
gained such reputation that they became
a kind of pattern, and other pieces of aV
jlike sort took the name, dropping the
first part of the w.ord for the sake oi
brevity. Hence our dollar may be said 5
to be the metallic product! of JoachimV
Yalley. New Tori Commercial. '
I Dress for Little Girls.
Dr. J. II. Ripley says in Bahyland: To
get the full, benefit of the 'summer vaca
tion,! little girls should not be dressed
every day as though on a Sunday-school
picnic or in training as embryo belles,
but their wardrobe should be simple and'
comfortable, permitting the freest action
ot lungs and limbs. It is not enough
that wb.en they return they be "as brown
as berries," but digestion should be im
proved, endurance increased and muscles
hardened. ? . -
Her Passion Revealed.
She A:id won't you be able to com
to my graduation, Mr. Ruskin?
IIe1 am afraid not, 3Iiss Rose. I will
tither come myself or send some flowers.
She Ah, that is very kind of you;
do so love flowers. Tid Bit.
cars. -