502 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
July 22 
BITS OF TALK. 
Fun With the Deaf. —Lots of deaf 
people will be interested in the follow¬ 
ing little story by Bill Arp in Home and 
Farm : 
Old man Hasty was deaf—very deaf. 
He was a nabor of mine when we lived 
in the country, and he hauled a load of 
wood to town every day to sell. He was 
poor and old, but never complained. 
The town boys used to poke fun at him, 
but he never got mad. *' Good-morning, 
Mr. Hasty,” they would say. “ Seventy- 
five cents,” he replied. “ How does your 
corporosity sagatiate ? ” “ Won’t take a 
cent less,” he said. The boys would laugh, 
and the old ma ■» would smile and drive 
on. “Wo! Wo!” 6aid the boys to the 
steers, aDd they would stop again. “ Git 
up Dick, git along, Brindle, you old lazy 
rascals; every time you git to town you 
want to stop every half a minute. Git 
up, I tell you,” and he trailed them with 
his thrash pole. About the time they 
were fairly started, the boys said “Wo!” 
again, and the old man had to lick them 
again, but he never got mad. 
A Cat Creamer. —Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, 
in Popular Science Monthly, tells this 
story : 
Cats are good observers, and often have 
good reasoning powers, and what I de¬ 
sire to say is about a small three-months- 
old kitten of mine, one of the pets of the 
household Like all kittens, this one has, 
after its night’s fast, a good, sharp appe¬ 
tite in the morning, but she has also an 
inordinate fondness for cream. So all- 
possessing is this taste upon her part 
that when her morning saucer of milk is 
placed before her, she simply sniffs it a 
moment or so, then goes away patiently 
to wait for the cream to rise upon it. in 
the course of 40 minutes or so she will 
ravenously devour the cream, taking 
great care, however, not to drink any of 
the “ blue milk” below it. Once or twice 
more during the day she will return. to 
the saucer to partake of such remaining 
cream as may subsequently arise to the 
surface. Never docs this kitten, though, 
drink the last third or so of the fluid, 
or the now “skimmed milk” that in¬ 
variably remains in her saucer. Obser¬ 
vation of a varied nature is exercised 
here, for this kitten has, on her part, not 
only discovered that standing milk will 
produce in a certain time a coat of cream 
upon its surface, but that this phenome¬ 
non at longer intervals repeats itself 
once or twice again during the day, and, 
to gratify her taste for that kind of food, 
her reasoning powers have taught her 
that it simply remains to await in pa¬ 
tience the fulfillment of the process. 
Florida Dry Ror.—A writer in Har¬ 
per’s Young People tells this story of an 
experience in an old Florida house : 
Some rooms in Florida have carpet on 
the floor, but most don’t. My room 
didn’t have any, of course. I sat down 
on the side of the bed to pull off my 
shoes, and heard something break. I 
thought it was the side piece of the bed¬ 
stead. “ It’s the climate,” said I to my¬ 
self ; “it’s made me so fat that I’m 
breaking the furniture ” I held the 
lamp down and looked, but the bed was 
all right; so I sat down again, and the 
minute I touched the bedstead the crack¬ 
ing began again. ‘ Go it!” said I, “ and 
we’ll see what will happen.” The crack¬ 
ing changed into a crash, and bang went 
one leg of the bedstead right through 
the floor. In those houses the floor 
above is the ceiling of the room below, 
so part of my bee stead stuck through 
into the parlor, and they picked the cas¬ 
ter off the parlor floor. It was dry rot, 
that was all. In that climate the dry 
rot works away at the inside of a board, 
and eats it all away but a little crust on 
the outside ; so the board looks perfectly 
sound when it has no strength at all, 
and as soon as any weight is put on it, 
it breaks. 
The Starch Trade.— Like most of the 
other Trusts, the starch monopoly is not 
making nearly as much money as it an¬ 
ticipated and promised the credulous 
dupes who invested in its “blind pool.” 
It has just failed to pay the promised 
dividend on its second preferred stock, 
which emphatically shows it isn’t in a 
very flourishing condition. Like the 
other Trusts, at the outset, in order to 
induce independent manufacturers, indi¬ 
vidual and corporate, to join it, it vastly 
overvalued their plants, and to pay for 
them at the exaggerated estimates, had 
to add an excessive amount of water to 
its legitimate stock, and the public have 
refused to pay interest on this fictitious 
capitalization. Like its confreres, the 
Starch Trust at first advanced prices, 
and got along swimmingly for a time ; 
but its enormous profits stimulated com¬ 
petition, which has kept constantly in¬ 
creasing until now starch is down to the 
lowest point ever known—cents per 
pound, although the supplies are not 
large. The consumptive demand, how¬ 
ever, is comparatively small, so that the 
low price of corn starch is attributed to 
the sluggishness of the trade, due in part 
to the money stringency. The home sup¬ 
ply of potato starch, too, is so tmall that 
a considerable amount has lately been 
imported ; but the outlook is not consid¬ 
ered hopeful. Blight to the Trusts! 
“THE BAREFOOT BOY.” 
“ The Barefoot Boy” is a beautiful 
little poem, brimming over with sweet¬ 
ness and simplicity, but do you really 
admire the hero of that lay ? You cer¬ 
tainly have seen him with bare feet and 
the “cheek of tan” speckled plentifully 
with freckles so large and numerous as 
to convince you that the supply is inex¬ 
haustible. Indeed every polka dot seems, 
on the face of it, to say : “ There are 
plenty more where we came from.” But 
these are not all the attractions of the 
“ little man :” his mother has made his 
pants too long so he has to turn them up, 
so you can just distinguish that they 
were intended for short pants. Isn’t he 
handsome ? Charming ! Would you like 
your boy to look like him and “ splank” 
around with dirty feet? Really, don’t 
you think your boy going about neatly 
shod is vastly more pleasing to the eye 
and more comfortable than this other 
youth ? 
Talk about the freedom of bare feet! 
The kind of freedom that makes a boy 
creep around as though he expected to 
step on a tack and makes him not dare 
to lift his eyes off the ground, is hardly 
enjoyable. A preferable kind is having 
the assurance that he is strongly and 
comfortably shod and can go here, there 
and everywhere without fear of losing 
half the precious skin on his feet. Think 
of those terrible stones and briers and 
the cruelly lacerated little feet from 
which mother picks out daily quite a 
stack of slivers. I speak from bitter ex¬ 
perience, for, although I am not a boy 
nor have I been one, poverty i ompelled 
me to pass my first 10 years in “ delight¬ 
ful” barefootedness. Fortunately, where 
I lived there were no stones to tear and 
bruise my flesh. No ; but there were 
tortures of another kind to be endured. 
There were sand-spurs here, there and 
every where—at least, wherever I chanced 
to step. Oh ! how they hurt with their 
sharp barbed points. Then occasionally, 
to liven up the way, there would be an 
ants’ nest or a nettle. Then 1 would 
unrestrainedly dance to the tune of my 
pain, not stopping to cooly and scien¬ 
tifically meditate upon the sensation 
produced by contact of formic acid with 
the flesh. 
Two-thirds of the year are very warm. 
I did not leave the house at mid day 
unless compelled to do so, for the sind 
collects the burning rays of the sun and 
generously imparts them to your bare 
feet till you jump from grass to shade, 
shade to grass, howling with pain. 
Just hear that man talking about the 
pleasures of being a barefoot boy ! Stuff 
and nonsense ! Don’t you see, he has two 
boys for whom he does not feel able to 
buy shoes and stockings? That is why he 
is so voluble on the subject. Depend 
upon it, he is trying quite as much to 
silence his own conscience as to convince 
his boys about the desirability of having 
bare feet. Yes, the cuticle does get 
thick, very much too much so, but it 
never keeps one from being hurt. How 
clean (?) those feet look that have raced 
over the farm all day; then when the 
the poor, little soul is so tired that it 
would like to tumble right into bed, 
there comes that hated question : “John, 
have you washed your feet ? Go and 
wash them, sir ! right off. Did you think 
you were going to spoil my clean sheets 
with those black feet ?” He is so tired 
he almost falls asleep rubbing the wash¬ 
cloth over his poor, bruised, scratched 
feet. It is cruel, cruel, to have children 
go barefoot. Oh ! that people would 
never have more children than they are 
able to keep supplied with shoes, enid. 
A MINNEAPOLIS MIRACLE. 
THE REMARKABLE CURE OF .1 B. WHITE 
OF THIS CITY. 
A Cripple for Two Years. Pronounced In¬ 
curable by Physicians and Given up by 
His Friends to Die—How He Obtained 
Relief and Became a Well Man—His 
Daughter's Marvelous Improvement. 
(From the Minneapolis Journal.) 
“ Precious is the panacea that cures 
when hope is gone and medical advice 
pronounces the death sentence—‘incur¬ 
able.’ How terrible it is to think of 
leaving this sweet life before the allotted 
years of man’s time here on earth are 
spent.” Thus spoke J. B. White, of 1,201 
3rd St., N. E., last night to a Journal 
reporter. Mr. White has been much 
talked about of late, and the following 
conversation explains why: 
“ I am a native of Shediac, New Bruns¬ 
wick, and of French descent. I have 
been in Minneapolis for many years. I 
am now 60 years old. I fell from a 
building two years ago and broke my 
thigh, besides injuring myself inter¬ 
nally. The doctors could do nothing for 
me but let the bones grow together as 
best they could. When I was able to 
walk on crutches I came near dying 
from the complication of troubles that 
had set in after the fall. For one year 
and a half I walked on crutches, striv¬ 
ing in vain to find some relief from the 
misery I felt night and day. The worst 
part of my afflictions was that I could 
not eat anything. If I could have taken 
nourishment and kept it down I could 
have stood the pain better. I had four 
doctors, and kept taking all sorts of 
medicines. I had to stop all of them or 
I would have been a dead man I have 
enough bottles left to start a drug store. 
I would be troubled so with headaches, 
and my hips would pain me so that I 
often thought I should go crazy. I was 
so emaciated that there was nothing to 
me but skin and bone. Last summer I 
felt as if I was nearly dead. My kidneys 
then began to bother me. I got so I 
could sleep only at intervals. Fin¬ 
ally I gave up in despair. One day I 
was sitting out on the porch. It was a 
beautiful, sunny day. The singing of 
birds and the odor of flowers set me to 
thinking of my childhood days. From 
that my thoughts reverted to the little 
French weekly paper, Le Moniteur Aca- 
dien, that we got, and I thought I would 
like to read it aDd see how things were 
at my old home. I told my wife to give 
me the last number. She brought me 
the one that came that morning. The 
first thing I saw was a long article about 
the miraculous cure of a cripple. I read 
on and on, becoming more interested 
than ever. The patient described in the 
article said that Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills 
for Pale People cured him and they 
would cure others. The story aroused 
my interest and I induced my druggist 
to ~end for them. I did not expect re¬ 
lief rightawa.y, but soon they made the 
headache pass away. After taking them 
some days I could eat. People laughed 
at me when I began to take the pills, 
telling me I was takir g so much candy. 
But the day I threw the crutches away 
they thought different. I am now well 
and hearty as a young man of 25.” 
At this juncture his married daughter, 
Mrs. N. White, came into the store. 
“ There,” said he, “ is another case. She 
has tried them, too.” The reporter 
thought it would be a good idea to speak 
of her case, also, since it wa6 a woman’s. 
Mrs. White married a man of the same 
name as her father, so this accounts for 
the same name. 
“The doctors,” she said, “told me I 
had uterine trouble. 1 was in a miser¬ 
able condition. Nothing that I took 
could alleviate the pains I would feel in 
my limbs and abdomen. I often had 
fluttering of the heart, and frequent 
weak spells. I would eat, but it would 
do me no good. I could not sleep. I 
was in misery and despair. My father 
took Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills, and his 
improvement was so rapid that 1 thought 
I would take them too. At first I felt 
worse, and then I began to mend so 
rapidly that I was astonished. I have 
taken seven boxes and am now nearly 
well. I can do my own work and can 
sleep and eat well. In the morniDgs I 
feel refreshed after a night’s rest.” 
August Grotefend, who keeps the Ger¬ 
mania Drug Store, at 1011 Main St., N. 
E., corroborated what Mr. White had 
said above in regard to his condition, 
saying, “ I have sold a great many since 
these cures. Some of the lumbermen 
going in the woods have taken half- 
dozen box lots of these pills with them. 
They certainly have done a wonderful 
lot of good and should have the entire 
credit of the cures.” 
On inquiry the Journal reporter found 
that these pills are now on sale at the 
various wholesale drug houses of Minne¬ 
apolis and St. Paul and are meeting with 
a good sale, but not as fast as they wiU 
sell as soon i.s their merit is fully known. 
He also found that they were manufact¬ 
ured by Dr. Williams’ Medicine Com¬ 
pany, Schenectady, N. Y.. and Brock- 
ville, Ont., and the pills are sold in boxes 
(never in bulk by the hundred) at 50 
cents a box, or six boxes for $2.50. 
Dr. Wi liams’ Pink Pills are a perfect 
blood builder and nerve restorer, curing 
such diseases as rheumatism, neuralgia, 
partial paralysis, locomotor ataxia, St. 
Vitus's dance, nervous headache, nervous 
prostration and the tired feeling there¬ 
from. the after effects of la grippe, in¬ 
fluenza and severe colds, diseases de¬ 
pending on humors in the blood, such as 
scrofula, chronic erysipelas, etc. Pink 
Pills give a hea’thy glow to pale and 
sallow complexions and are a specific 
for the troubles peculiar to the female 
system; in men they effect a radical 
cure in all cases arising from mental 
worry, overwork or excesses of any 
nature.— Adv. 
BEST LINE 
CHICAGO AND STLOUIS 
TO 
DENVER 
FOUR TRAINS DAILY 
THE NEW BOTANY: 
A Lecture on the best method of 
Teaching the Science. Valuable to 
Students and Amateurs, being a Use¬ 
ful Guide in Studying “ The Beauti¬ 
ful Science.”—By W. J. Beal, M. Sc., 
Ph. D., Professor of Botany, Agri¬ 
cultural College, Michigan. Third 
Edition, enlarged and revised. 
Price, paper, 25 cents. 
Achromatic Telescope. 
Few things are more interesting or 
useful in both leisure and busy moments 
in the country than a 
good telescope, or harder 
to find. We believe that 
we have in this a thor¬ 
oughly good telescope 
that we can offer to our 
subscribers in con¬ 
fidence that it will give 
satisfaction. When ex¬ 
tended it is over 16 
inches,and,when closed, 
6% inches in length. On 
a clear day you can dis¬ 
tinctly see time on a 
tower three miles away. 
The moons of Jupiter 
can be seen with it. The 
telescope tubes are 
made from heavy pol¬ 
ished brass; the body is 
covered with morocco, 
making a thoroughly 
substantial instrument. 
It is achromatic; that is, 
does not blur the vision 
by a confusion of colors. 
Retail price, $4.50. Our 
price, prepaid, with a 
year’s subscription, 
$3.50; with a renewal 
and a new subscription, 
$4.25. We test each one 
before sending it out. 
The user must remember that the tubes 
should be pulled out full length, and 
the adjustment to the eye made only 
with the section nearest the eye piece, 
moving it out and in as necessary. 
THE RURAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
Cor. Chambers and Pearl Sts., N. Y. 
