"'Who?' said the man who had been there a long time. 'Do you mean the fellow over there? Why his name's Noah.'"—Washington Post.
STRONG WATER.
Mr. Edison was once asked to send a phonographic cylinder to a fair. He sent this reply:
"You ask me to send you a phonographic cylinder and to say a few words to the audience. I do not think the audience would take any interest in dry scientific subjects, but perhaps they might be interested in a little story that a man sent me on a phonographic cylinder the other day from San Francisco. In the year 1873 a man from Massachusetts came to California with a chronic liver complaint. He searched all over the coast for a mineral spring to cure the disease, and finally he found, down in the San Joaquin valley, a spring the waters of which almost instantly cured him. He therefore started a sanitarium, and people all over the world came and were quickly cured. Last year this man died, and so powerful had been the action of the waters that they had to take his liver out and kill it with a club.—Edison."—Woman's Home Companion.
A SILVER-PLATED CAT.
A remarkable freak of lightning occurred some time ago near the small village of New Salem, Vermont. Arent S. Vandyck occupies an old mansion, in the parlor of which hung a collection of Revolutionary swords, one of which was heavily plated with silver. On the night in question a terrific thunderstorm burst, and one particularly heavy crash stunned every one in the house.
Quickly recovering, the family hastened to see what damage had been done. Suddenly the youngest Vandyck pointed to an old-fashioned sofa. There lay what seemed to be a silver cat, curled up as comfortable as could be. Each glittering hair was separate and distinct, and each silvery bristle of the whiskers described as graceful a curve as if in life.
Turning to the sword on the wall just above the sofa, father and son remarked that the plated sword had been stripped of all its silver, the scabbard was a strip of blackened steel and the hilt had gone altogether.
The family cat had been electroplated by lightning. A round hole in the window-pane, about the size of a half-crown, showed where the electric fluid had entered. There was a charred streak showing the path of the lightning as it made its way to the sword, down which it passed to the sofa, carrying with it the fused silver, which it scientifically deposited on that magnetic animal, the cat.