Navigation on tl. ‘sage. 
One of the very crookecest streams 
anywhere is the Osage river in Mis- 
souri. In that region they tell of a 
fariner living on the banks of that riv- 
er who had a small flatboat which one 
day he loaded with produce and floated 
down to market, six miles away. He 
exchanged the produce for goods at 
one of the stores and loaded his goods’ 
in the flatboat. . ' 
“How are you going to get your stuff 
home, Bill?” asked a friend. “Got a 
steamboat to tow you back?” 
“T am going to float back,’ was the 
response. 
“How are you going to do that? I 
don’t understand.” 
“T guess you don’t know much about 
this river. It doubles on itself just be- 
low here and runs back to within less 
than a quarter of a mile of my place. 
I’ve got a l:nding on both banks and a 
team of horses than can drag the boat 
over from one landing to the other.”’— 
Kansas City Journal. 
Balkan Ballads. 
In the Balkan countries the ballad 
makers have certainly been at least as 
important as the makers of laws. Ser- 
via’s naiional ballads, commemorating 
the glories of the Servian Hmperor 
Dushan, the fatal battle of Kossovo 
and the legendary exploits of the hero 
Marko ! .yevich and his horse Sha- 
rats, are of Homeric proportions and, 
sung to the accompaniment of a guitar 
with cords of horsehair tails, have 
kept national feeling warm for cen- 
turies. In recent years the Servian 
government published a popular edi 
tion. In Macedonia Sic Charles Eliot 
heard a schoolboy recite a Buigarian 
poem. which took an hour and a quar- 
ter, with a simple but significant plot. 
The pasha of Sofia summons a Bul- 
garian hero who is his friend and tells 
him he has orders to execute him. 
The Bulgarian asks why. The pasha 
says he does not know, but he must 
do it, and he does.—London Chronicle. 
Floral Death Legends. 
By the Mexicans marigolds are known 
as death flowers from an exceedingly 
appropriate legend that they sprang up 
on the ground stained by the life blood 
of those who fell victims to the love of 
gold and cruelty of the early Spanish 
settlers. Among the Virginian tribes, 
too, red clover was supposed to have 
sprung from and to be colored by the 
blood of the red man slain in battle 
with the white invaders. In a similar 
manner the red poppies which followed 
the plowing of the field of Waterloo 
were said to have sprung from the 
blood of the killed and wounded in that 
famous battle. According to tradition 
the Danish invasion is the cause of the 
daneweed, a coarse, asteraceous plant 
common in England, as it sprang from 
the blood of Danes slain in battle, and 
if cut on a certain day in the year it 
bleeds. The dwarf e.der, for the same 
reason, is called danewort and dane- 
blood.—_Suburban Life. 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
When Swinburne Was Ready. 
A diverting picture of Swinburne, his 
frock coat bulging with manuscript, 
waiting to be asked to read aloud his 
latest poem, is given in HWdmund 
Gosse’s “Portraits and Sketches.” 
After floating about the room and 
greeting his host and hostess with 
many little becks of the head and af- 
fectionate smiles and light wavings of 
the fingers, he would settle at last up- 
right on a chair, or by preference on a 
sofa, and sit there in a state of rigid 
immobility. the toes of one foot pressed 
against the heel of the other. Then he 
would say in an airy, detached way, as 
though speaking of some absent per- 
son, “I have brought with me my ‘Tha- 
lassius’ or my ‘Wasted Garden’ (or 
whatever it might happen to be), which 
I have just finished.” Then he would 
be folded again in silence, looking at 
nothing. We then were to say, “Oh, 
do please read it to us! Will you?” 
Pairing Off For Dinner, 
The custom of walking to the dining 
room arm in arm, “taking a lady in to 
dinner,’ strange though it may seem, 
is comparatively modern, as prior to 
the middle of the eighteenth century it 
was the custom for the hostess to go in 
to dinner first, the ladies following in 
order of rank and the gentlemen after, 
all in single file, also in the order of 
rank, the host being last. This, how: 
ever, gave rise to so many duels on 
questions of precedence both among 
the ladies and the gentlemen that the 
eustom of “pairing off’? was begun in 
order that no dispute might arise, it 
being one of the customs of society 
that no duel challenge could be given 
in the presence of the lady concerning 
whom the dispute had arisen.—New 
York American. 
Medical Fees In Bygone Days. 
At the beginning of the eighteenth 
century the usual fees to physicians 
and surgeons in England were “to a 
graduate in physick, his due is about 
10 shillings, though he commonly ex- 
pects or demands 20 shillings. Those 
that are only licensed physicians, their 
due is no more than 6s. 8d., though 
they commonly demand 10 shillings. 
“A surgeon’s fee is 12 pence a 
mile, be his journey near or far, 10 
groats to set a bone broke or out of 
joint and for letting blood a shilling; 
the cutting or amputation of any limb 
is £5, but there is no settled fee for 
the cure.’ The system of regulating 
the fee according to the pocket of the 
patient is almost as old as history.— 
Westminster Gazette. 
The Old Bedlam. 
Bethlehem (pronounced Bedlam), the 
London lunatic asylum, was originally 
founded in 1247 as a priory, but is 
spoken of as a hospital for lunatics in 
1472, and when the church was de- 
spoiled it was granted to the city of 
London as such an asylum. At one 
time the wretched inmates were exhib- 
ited to the public like so many wild 
beasts, as Pepys notes in his diary and 
one sketches. 
Patients that were harmless or half 
cured were given badges and released 
to beg on the streets. Edgar in “King 
Lear” impersonates one of these wan- 
dering Tom-o’-Bedlams, 
Man’s Dual Nature, 
The professorial mind for all its 
acuteness is liable to occasional lapses, 
like less highly trained intellects. One 
amusing case in point is reported in 
the Philadelphia Public Ledger: 
A certain professor was struggling to 
make the point that both parents have 
an equal influence upon a child. 
“For,” he continued gravely, “a man 
is as much the son of his father as he 
is the daughter of bis mother.” 
Way to Apply For a Job. 
Having lost three jobs for which he 
had applied, after he seemed in a fair 
way to get any one of them, a certain 
young man has figured out where he 
made his mistake. 
“T referred to wages and hours be- 
fore the interview was three minutes 
old,” he explained. 
Ordinarily the business world recog- 
nizes the right of the applicant to 
know how much money he is going to 
make each week and how long each ~ 
day he will be expected to work and 
how many days a week. This is col- 
lective recognition. 
The thorough business men will not 
close an interview until he has brought 
up the subject of pay and working 
hours. He wants it understood, of 
course, before he employs any one, but 
when the applicant makes the first 
mention of it a bad impression is cre- 
ated.—Chicago Tribune. 
Reasonable Objection. 
Conan Doyle was once asked why he 
didn’t establish a detective agency and 
employ Sherlock Holmes’ tactics in 
conducting the business. “For the very 
good reason,’ he replied, “that all the 
knots Sherlock Holmes untied were of 
my own tying. I should fail if I under- 
took to unravel other people’s entangle- 
ments. I believe that on one occaston 
I could have done so, though. I was in 
a tailor shop when a,rather unattrac- 
tive man was selecting a pair of trou- 
sers. He flatly objected to striped 
goods, and I got the idea that he was 
an ex-convict. To satisfy myself I vis- 
ited one or two prisons and, sure 
enough, found the man’s picture in the 
rogues’ gallery. He had had enough of 
striped clothes.”—Detroit Free Press. 
His Aerial Flights. 
“Henry,” said Mrs. Hornbeak anx- 
jously, “I ain’t one of those people 
who worries very much, but I don’t 
like the idea of our son Arthur becom- 
ing one of those bird men.” 
“Who said he was going to be an 
aviator?’ asked Mr. Hornbeak. 
“Well, here’s Cousin Bill writing 
that we’d better put a curb on Arthur; 
says he’s flying awful high for a young 
fellow.”—London Express. 
