Curious

With a piece of string and a little sand and grease some Hindoo convicta recently sawed through an iron bar iwo inches in diameter in five hours and escaped from jall. A writer in the Engineering Magazine says that during the last fifty years the size of steamships has been multiplied twenty-fold, the horsepower employed to drive them has been multiplied forty-fold and the speed with which they traverse the sea has insreased three-Lold. It is a curious fact that Americans are underselling the British in the making of golf sticks. An agent of an American house, who arrived in London a few days ago, had no difficulty in obtaining orders for 8,000 sticks from the largest dealers in golf goods in Scotland and America. The American goods are better made and better finished than the English at anything like the same price. Twenty millions of dollars is the sum which the French governmeHt proposes to devote to the Paris exhibition of 1900. Nearly $10,000,000 " will be consumed in the construction of two palaces in the Champs Elysees and those in the Champ de Mars, in the Esplanade des Invalides and on the quays. The bridges across the Seine are to cost $1,000,000 and the mechanical and electrical services another $1,000,000. In a word, France proposes to aid the exposition on a scale of unprecedented magnificence. The following surprising story is told - as illustrative of one phase of the character of the Russian peasant - in a recent magazine: During the last Russo-Turkish war, a Russian regiment marching from Philippopolis to Adrianople overtook the Turkish refugees; whereupon the terrified Turkish women threw down their infants in their flight. The Russian soldiers, while pressing on as rapidly as possible, stopped and picked up the babies, until every man in the regiment was carrying a child, and the general was absolutely obliged to stop the march and find carts and men to transfer the children to a place of safety.