Picking Prickly Peppers.
Samuel Pocket’s pockets are not pickpocket proof, but to Sam it’s no laughing matter. While he was boarding a street car Saturday in Saginaw, Mich., on his way to a picnic, some one slipped his hand into one of Sam’s pistol pockets and fled with a pocketbook containing $180. When Pocket put his own hand in his own pocket, he found the pocketbook, pelf, and picnic pass were gone, and his discovery was positive and painful.
Old “Nipsic” Goes Up in Smoke.
The touch of a match and all that was left of the gallant old battleship Nipsic, which helped make naval history for nearly fifty years, was consigned to flames on Lumi Island on Bellingham Bay, Wash.
Two incidents stand out above all the rest in the palmy days of the Nipsic. She was of Admiral Farragut’s fleet at Mobile and she was the only American vessel to come out whole in the typhoon at Aphia, Samoa, in 1889.
Old Lady, Seventy-nine, is Some Rider.
With the mercury at one hundred degrees, Mrs. Cynthia E. Davis, of Goshen, Ind., celebrated her seventy-ninth-birthday anniversary by riding a bicycle to New Paris and return, a distance of twelve miles. Again at home she said to two nephews and a pair of slender gazelles who may have some right to be called second or third cousins: “Come on, chickens, I’ll scramble ye a few aigs.”
Loud Siren Screecher Terrorizes Hundreds.
“Bob” Maynard is known to be one of the best logging engineers in Chireno, Texas, but he doesn’t like to run a wheezy, prancing old steam hurdy-gurdy. Not at all; give Bob a likely hummer and he is the chap that will keep her humming. Thus it was that he no sooner had engaged with a logging outfit than he demanded and got a brand-new engine. The whistle on the new power producer was too much like a boy’s penny trumpet to suit the fastidious Bob. Bob had had some experience along the Mississippi and had heard the noisy whistles that adorn some of the big flat-bottom boats. And in due time there arrived from the big shop up north a siren screecher warranted to be heard ten miles, in either direction, on a still day.
Everything adjusted to Bob’s practical taste, he proceeded to run the new beauty over to where it was to do duty at a busy lumber camp. Arrived in that vicinity at about the same time was a full-fledged Sunday school out for a picnic in the woods. When Bob let loose with the great siren screecher—now low and mournful—then wild and alarming—and again to its limit, as if some eighty-foot, hundred-ton dinosaurus had suddenly come to life and was setting up an unearthly howl for its mate, Bob’s heart fluttered with delight.[Pg 63]