SECULAR | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 11, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 43.

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SECULAR.

—Frozen sturgeon are being shipped by the car load from Portland, Oregon, to New York.

—The British ship Bolan, from Calcutta for Dublin, is reported lost at sea and thirty-three lives lost.

—Prohibition in Kansas is no myth. A hotel keeper was recently convicted for selling hard cider.

—There is a new gold excitement in Nicaragua. The reputed rich fields lie along the San Juan del Sur River.

—President Harrison has designated Thursday, November 28, as a day of "national thanksgiving and prayer."

—The German Government has begun the construction of four 10,000-ton iron-clad vessels, at a cost of $2,500,000 each.

—The Westinghouse Electric Company, of Pittsburg, Pa., has secured a contract for a large electric light plant in Peking, China.

—The British wheat crop is reported considerably short; consequently the requirements from abroad will be much larger than last year.

—Three car loads of Pacific Coast delegates and visitors to the W. C. T. U. meeting at Chicago, left the Oakland depot on the 30th ult.

—The nail factory at Bellaire, Ohio, was demolished by a boiler explosion on the 30th ult. Damages are reported at $200,000. No lives lost.

—The opium business, like the liquor traffic, is hard to keep within the bounds of the law. It is smuggled into the country by land and by sea.

—A telegram from Guatemala states that the revolution is ended and that the government triumphs. All the revolutionist prisoners were shot.

—It is rumored that about forty clerks in the Pension Office, who were implicated in the irregularities of Ex-commissioner Tanner, are to be dismissed.

—The Prince of Wales is suffering from Bright's disease, and it is said he is more than ever certain of his long-felt presentiment that he will never be king of England.

—Miss Clara, the adopted daughter of C. P. Huntington, of Southern Pacific Railroad fame, was married in London, October 28, to Prince Hatzfeldt, of Schoenstein, Germany.

—Five Chinese lepers were shipped for the Orient last week, by the health authorities of San Francisco, on the steamer City of Peking. This is said to be all that are known to the officers in the city.

—Reports from Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming, are to the effect that November was ushered in by severe and extensive snow-storms, doing much damage to live-stock, railroads, and telegraph lines.

—A cable dispatch says: "In England and Wales there are at present nearly 9,000 persons imprisoned as debtors, and if Ireland and Scotland were included the grand total of pecuniary defaulters would exceed 10,000."

—The light-house on Mitylene Island, Grecian Archipelago, was wrecked by an earthquake on the 28th ult. At Constantinople there was slight damage, and in Italy serious damage and loss of life is reported at Gallipolis.

—An immigrant agent says there are about 2,000 natives of the Bearn Department, Southern France, now living and employed in San Francisco. They are highly commended as orderly and efficient laborers and house-maids.

—Just think of a whole city celebrating the anniversary of a beer establishment! In the city of Munich, Bavaria, recently there was a great uproar in honor of the third centennial anniversary of the Hofbrauhaus, or royal brewery.

—A Lawrence, Mass., dispatch of the 28th ult. says: "The spread of diphtheria and scarlet fever is so alarming that in all the Catholic Churches the priests yesterday warned the people not to visit each other any more than was necessary."

—Last week a party of men captured and lynched a man named Robert Berry, who had killed his mother-in-law at Lexington, N. C., a short time previously. The unusual part of the story is that twenty of the lynchers have been arrested.

—The Omaha Bee is authority for the statement that arrangements have been made for carrying the east-bound mail across the continent in forty hours less time than heretofore, and west-bound mail trains will beat the old time by twenty-five hours and thirty-five minutes.

—Railway matters are again somewhat muddled. An independent freight agreement between the Union Pacific and the Chicago and Northwestern roads has completely broken up the Interstate Commerce Railway Association, and the various companies are prospecting for new alliances.

—Over three hundred thousand telephones are now in use in the United States alone. It is claimed that conversation can easily be carried on for a distance of one thousand miles, and the prediction is made by experts that "we shall yet be able, not only to hear, but to see our friends at a distance, by electrical methods."

—Some months ago, a young lawyer of Los Angeles, named Singletary, was reported missing. He was one of many who started in search of the fabulous gold mines in Lower California. Recently some miners found his body on the desert, he no doubt having perished from exhaustion and thirst. The body is said to be completely mummified and well preserved.

—Parties supposed to be old Mrs. Bender and daughter, of the family once noted in Kansas as wholesale murderers, have been arrested at Niles, Michigan. A Mrs. McCann, whose husband is supposed to have been murdered by the Benders, and the deputy sheriff, who made the arrest on a requisition from the governor of Kansas, are both certain of the identity of the prisoners.

—A correspondent of the N. Y. Examiner, writing of the city of Washington, says: "The city accommodations for strangers are elastic. Nowhere else are private dwellings so easily transformed into boarding-houses. This is owing to the intermittent population, the variations ranging from none to 100,000 strangers. The residents of the District, all told, do not exceed 220,000, of which number the statistics do not inform us how many do not take boarders."

—Governor Fowler, of North Carolina, protests against the transfer of Geronimo's band of Apaches to that State, but the protest is not likely to avail. Geronimo, it is said, now runs the Indian Sunday-school and is no longer a terror to his white neighbors.