Francis M. Collins, eighty-eight-year-old war veteran, has grown tired and lonely sitting at the foot of his own grave in Forest Home Cemetery, at Milwaukee, Wis., admiring the flowers and the monument—especially the monument. Collins has decided that man was not meant to be alone, on the earth or under it, and is planning to get married.
For twelve years Collins has been a daily visitor at the grave. For a long time it was a source of pride for him to look at his name and war record carved in a solitary magnificence on the handsome tombstone. He prepared for his burial by a budget filed with a certificate for five hundred dollars with a local bank.[Pg 60]
The solitary name on one side of the stone began to look forlorn and lonely. The veteran got the habit of romancing on how nice it would be to have another name—her name—on the opposite side. There was no particular woman then. But there is now. Her name is Orrie Viola—something—but Collins will not tell the rest of it.
The other day a stone carver came trudging through the cemetery with his tools. He hunted around in the vicinity of the chapel until he found a plot that looked like a little garden, and beside it was an old man with a patriarchal beard. When the stone carver left, the name “Orrie Viola Collins” smiled back at the afternoon sun, and Collins was smiling up at the newly carved name.
Some New Inventions.
A cotton manufacturer of Westbrook, Maine, has patented a machine for the harvesting of cotton which has just been successfully demonstrated at Fairwold, S. C. The harvester picks the cotton by sucking the lint out of the bolls by compressed air, somewhat on the order, apparently, of the vacuum cleaner.
A mechanic of St. Louis, Mo., has invented a “non-skidder,” which is intended to prevent the possibility of accident to an automobile by making it impossible for the car to slide off the road. The attachment consists of two shoes fastened to the rear of the car, between the wheels. When the car begins to skid, the driver touches a button, and the shoes instantly drop to the surface of the road, stopping the car. The shoes are about eighteen inches long and three inches wide, made of hard metal with a corrugated undersurface.
A device perfected by an inventor of Wakefied, Mass., enables the motorman of a street car to see the entire interior of the car or to have an unobstructed view down the outside. It consists of a series of mirrors arranged at angles in a small tube, through which images of any object are reflected.
For use in small gatherings there has been invented an attachment for phonographs that illustrates songs as they are sung by projecting lantern-slide views on a screen hung in front of the phonograph horn.