Enclosure with 19 August 1869
to Olivia L. Langdon • Buffalo, N.Y.
(Buffalo Express, 19 Aug 69)
PEOPLE AND THINGS.
—The complaint of the coal mines—colliery.—Boston Post.
—The reception of the Governor-General of Canada at Prince Edward Island was very cordial.1
—The Aldermen and members of the Board of Health, of Milwaukee, have had a sort of family swimming-match. The doctors won—the Al[d]ermen got aground.
—Philadelphia is almost out of water to drink, because of the exceeding low stage of the Schuylkill river. Considerable distress has resulted.
—Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau, Boston, has on its list one hundred and fifty lecturers and readers, whose services are available for the forthcoming season.
—Sir Hildebrand, of Missouri, has emigrated. He had thinned out the population until further amusement was too difficult to obtain to make it worth a man’s while.2
—Frederick Wermicke, a soldier of the First Empire, aged 87 years, was arrested in Madison county, Missouri, recently for some offense against the revenue laws. The old gentleman’s eldest son is 60 years of age and his youngest two.
—One of those venerable parties, a pre-Adamite man, has been dug up from a depth of ninety-eight feet, in Alabama. He was of prodigious stature, and is supposed by savans to have existed twelve thousand years ago. Life was entirely extinct when they got him out.3
—Another Colfax party has gone to the Pacific, viz: Geo. Mathews and wife, the mother and step-father of the Vice-President,4 their daughter Carrie and James M. Mathews, brother of George, his wife and daughter, Lucy. They expect to be absent about three months.
—Miss Carrie A. Benning, a young lady of Harris county, Georgia, who was reduced by the war from wealth to poverty, has in cultivation a five acre field of cotton, which is said to be the best in the neighborhood. She planted and worked it herself, with no assistance except in one plowing.
—Lord Taunton, better known formerly as Henry Labouchere, paid back £100,000 compensation money which the Bristol and Exeter Railroad Company had paid his father for cutting through his lands. He saw that his estates were enhanced in value by far more than the ordinary price of the land taken from him.5
—An Alexandria (Egypt) merchant, ruined by the Viceroy’s heavy taxes, recently sold his son to a slave dealer to obtain yet another 900 piastres for the tax gatherer. It would have been far better to have sold him short for double the amount, and then run off before he was worth it.
—Figaro says “while London raised a monument to the wealthy American, Mr. Peabody, the Pope has ordered a bust to the Yankee so universally honored. On his voyage to Rome Mr. Peabody presented to the treasury of Pope Pius IX., for his poor, $1,000,000. A fact curious to note is that Mr. Peabody is a Protestant.”6
—A man in Maine has been digging for Captain Kidd’s treasures for a year past, under the guidance of the spirits. He is very enviably fixed, because, from present appearances, his job will afford him steady employment as long as he may want it. There would also seem to be work enough to even justify him in hiring some outsiders to help him.
—The Newport lady with the ring “cut out of a solid diamond” is still going the rounds of the press with undiminished ferocity. Those things are common in Pennsylvania. The species is the “black” diamond, and this Newport lady’s experiment has lately raised its price several dollars a ton, and brought sorrow to many a struggling family. Let her have her share of the abuse.
—Kalloch, of Kansas, and formerly of Boston, is summering in Maine. His talents are unimpaired.7
—Choy-Chow and Sing-Man, the distinguished Chinamen, have started on their return to California:
California’s dull,
For she’s lost her Moguls,
And don’t know where for to find them;
But let them alone
And they’ll waggle home,
And carry their tails behind them.
—The Hartford’s Post’s inextinguishable “old man” has turned up again. He is only sixty-five, this time, but makes up for it in the liveliness of his experiences and the amount of things he can do. He is Cornelius Snyder, of Spencer, Ky., upon this occasion, and has “been twice married—eighteen children by his first wife. He has walked fifty-four miles in seven hours, and is to-day, perhaps, one of the best walkers of the State.” Weston is young yet—let him be encouraged. There is no telling what he may be able to do when he has had sixty-five years’ practice.8
—The Brown family are assembling in convention at Simpson’s Corners, R. I., to form a plan of action with regard to their immense estates in England. So the telegram is worded. This is bad enough as it is—but will it stop here? Those Smiths will be at it next. It would be more generous in these two families to club themselves together in a joint convention and hire one of those ample western deserts to hold it in, and not be discommoding a helpless little State like Rhode Island which has never done them any harm.
—A correspondent of the Cleveland Herald reports that a Mrs. Birney, 62 years of age, living near Tippecanoe, Harrison county, Ohio, has for twenty years been in the habit of falling into a state of unconsciousness at about ten o’clock on Sunday mornings, during which she delivers ungrammatical religious discourses. Of course, when a woman does anything remarkable, it must be published far and wide, but acres and acres of poor clergymen can go on doing such things all their lives and a subsidized press takes no notice of it. A mean partiality ill becomes journalism.9
—“For many years the most wonderful comet the world has ever seen” has been advertised to appear and remain visible during the months of July and August and September of this year, and grow constantly brighter until it has finished its engagement, when it will depart in the direction of Saturn to play an engagement in the provinces. The journalists of Wisconsin are observing it now, though why a comet should visit Wisconsin before it visits New York is another of those astronomical mysteries. It appears after eleven at night, and is thenceforth visible until nearly [daylight]. It is described as being “many thousand times larger than the earth, and is a solid mass of fire with a tail that would reach around the earth more than a hundred times.” We feel compelled to throw cold water on this comet—not in the hope of putting it out, but simply because comets, as a general rule, ought not to be encouraged, and more especially because Wisconsin journalists are too far from good points of observation to see correctly and have no business meddling with astronomy anyhow. Their comet bears marks of human manipulation, for Providence never makes these sort[s] of things out of “solid masses of fire.” We do not approve of criticising comets, especially with asperity, but this one has too short a tail for the amount of style it appears to be putting on. We never had any opinion of short-tailed comets.10
Explanatory Notes | Textual Commentary
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L3, 466–470; Clemens borrowed some of the items in “People and Things” verbatim from other
newspapers, largely unidentified. No reprint of the entire column is known, but parts of it may have been borrowed in turn.
Provenance:The original clipping that Clemens enclosed is not known to survive.
Emendations and textual notes:
daylight • day-|light
