Camp Fire Stories

E CLIP THE FOLr lowing concerning the gond work ol the ladies of the W. R. C. from the W.-stern Veteran "Mrs. Hollen E Day, president o) the W. R. C. Soldiers' Home of Missouri, is working hard to accomplislthe purpose of the organization. A number of desirable bids have been received from loealities wanting the home, all of which wlll be considered at the annual meeting at Maeon. She urges that memberships be renewed at once so that there may be a large representation at that meeting The dues are $1 a year and must be paid to entitle one to a vote. A payment oi $25 makes one a member for Ufe. Mrs. Day criticises a certain post in the department for giving a supper and entertainment for the benefit of the Confedérate home at Higg-insville, while 11 has done nothing in that direction foi its own comrades. Mrs. C. A. Day, 181E Penn Street, and Mrs. Alice L. Glenn. Fourteenth and Jefferson, Kansas City JIo., are authorized to receive subscriptions for the home." Wateh for the Drop. One of the soldiers of the Seventb cavalry at Fort Sheridan strolled inte the canteen one day and found a nuraber of soldiers trying games of one kind and another. Some were tricks in athletics and some were amateur sleight-of-hand performances. The young cavalryman waited till things eased up a little, and then climbed on a table and stuck the open blade of nis pocketknife into the plain pine ceiling. Then he got down and announced that he would set a beer bottle so squarely ander that knife that when ie feil it would drop straight into the neck oí the bottle. Nobody believed he could do it, and before the knife feil he had a number of bets against his ability. Just then the knife loosened. Straight as a dart it feil and dropped into the neck of the bottle, touching not so much as a hint of the sides, and knocking out the bottom in its heavy fall. There was a murmur of amazement and the declaration that he could not do it again. The cavalryman said nothing, collected his debts and went back to his quarters. After a day or two, in which the fame of his prowess had been circulated, he went to the canteen ag-ain and some one tackled him to try the trick again. He said it wasn't any trick; it was simply his ability to gauge correctly. They had never noticed any particular mechanical marvels about him, and they were willing to bet that he could not repeat the success. Again he took their bets, again he climbed upon a table and stuck his knife in the ceiling, again he put a beer bottle under it, and again the knife went home, as if it knew the way. Time and again he did them. And then one day an infantryman from Niobrara watched him. As the cavalryman got down from the table the "doughboy" noticed a tiny drop of water fall from the handle of the knife and mark a spot on the floor. Vhen the bottle was set it covered that spot. Of course the knife when it feil must fall where the water did. But the infantryman didn't give it away, says the Chicago Herald. He struck the horseman for a third of the proceeds of the bets, and kept its solution for his own use when he gets to his fort on the frontier. A Hint from Henry Clay A well known southern politician who dled just before the civil war not infrequently spoke of an incident that took place In his first term in congress, in which he received a lesson in statecraft from the great whig leader, Henry Clay. "I was a young man and an enthusiastic whig," he said, "and I entered congress, quivering with eagerness to serve my party and to distinguish myself. I was on my feet shouting "Mr. Speaker' a dozen times a day. I opposed even petty motions made by the opposite party, and bitterly denounced every bilí, however trivial, for which they voted. Before the session was half over I had contrived to make myself personally obnoxious to every democrat that I met. "One day after an ill-tempered outbreak on a question of no moment, I turned and saw Mr. Clay watching me with a twinkle in his eye. " 'C ,' he said, 'you g0 fishing eometimes?' " 'Tes.' " 'Don't you find that the best rod is the one that gives a little at each joint? It does not snap and break at every touch, but bends, and shows its strength only when a heavy weight is put on it.' "I caught his meaning. I had seen him ihatting familiarly with the very men whom I was berating. Yet I knew when great interests clashed he was the one man whom they feared. "I set myself then to learn patience and coolness. It is the strong, flexible rod which does not break under the big flsh." A personal friend of General Grant ' says: "During the whole course of the war I never knew him to indulge in the acrid personalities which were too common among many of the northern ïombatants when condemning the leaders of the rebellion. But he sat down tvith his troops before Richmond with pexorable patience, until he had won he victory." To come down from national to dotnestic life, it will always be found that ,he fretful, quarrelsome member of the :amily is of little use in a crisis. It ia ihe men and women of coolness, rejerve and good humor, who control the mergencies in the household as men nd women of this type have always Jone in all human history. Statues for iirooklyn. Three more statues will soon ornatient Brooklyn. The city has in the past een rather slow in the matter of staues and monuments, but the sentiment n their favor is growing. The Union Oeague club is at work raising funds !or the equestrian statue of General 3rant, as designed by Partridge. This vork of art will be placed on a huge pedestal on the plaza in front of thf club house, at Bedford avenue and Dean st.reet, says the New York Press. The admirers of General Henry W. Slocum also have inaugurated a movement whose object is the rnising of a statue to that famous union soldier, and Grand Army men, some time ago, started a fund for a statue to General G. K. Warren. Henry Ward Beecher's statue is stil] in front of the city hall, but it is believed that it will, in the course of time, be transferred to Prospect park. That great resort is lacking in statuary and monumental attractions, the only statue it possesses being that of J. S. T. Stranahan, Brooklyn's best known cltizen. The venerable merchant and politioian is probably the only living Amer'ican honored by a public statue. There is a fine statue of Abraham Lincoln on the plaza leading to Prospect park, but it is in a place that is not calculated to secure for it the greatest amount of respect and care, and the Grand Army men wish the authorities to have the statue placed in a suitable place inside of the park. It may be removed in time for a Decoration day celebration. These three, with an excellent one of Alexander Hamilton, in front of the Hamilton club house at Clinton and Remsen streets, are all the public statues which the great city of Brooklyn can boast. On An English Line. Some singular things are recorded as having happened yesterday between a soldier, a footwarmer, a locomotive and other rolling stock on the Great Western line in the parts of Berkshire and Newberry. The soldier and the footwarmer were traveling in the same compartment. There was, of course, nothing stronger than water inside the footwarmer; there may have been inside the soldier. Whether the footwarmer did anything to him- boiled his boots or froze him- does not appear. But what the soldier did to the footwarraer was first to cast it forth into space. The space into which he cast it happened, at that particular moment, to be occupled by the locomotive of another train. Irritated, but illogical, the footwarmer seems to have struck the locomotive for all it was worth. The locomotive retaliated. Thereupon the footwarmer went back to its own train for the soldier. In its eagerness to g-et at him it broke the handle off the carriage door, and the wrong carriage door at that. Failing the door, it tried the window, and the nerves of the lady who occupied the compartment. She screamed. The footwarmer recoiled, made a last desperate effort, broke another window and feil exhausted on the six foot way. There it was picked up, weltering in some congealed fluid or other, and battered almost out of recognition. What light the soldier may be able to throw upon this strange drama remains to be seen. Endurance of the Chinese. "Remarkable though the statement is in the Sun's Chinese correspondence concerning the endurance of Chinese soldiers, I can quite understand it," said an ex-police surgeon of San Francisco, who is visiting New York. "The correspondent says that, though the men in questtion were shot through the chest and the head, they walked great distances; and in one case, if I remember aright, it was a hundred miles. "During four years of service as police surgeon In San Francisco, I saw sorae pretty severe cases of wounded Chinamen- yes, and China women, too - and I declare their Insensitiveness to pain seemed to be almost absolute. Part of it, I have no doubt, is due to racial, inherent stoicism; but I ara also inclined to the opinión that the Chinese do not feel the pain as we do. Now, I remember the case of a woman who was brought down to the city prison ward from Chinatown with her head literally split open in five places by one of the highbinders' hatchet men. From the very first to the last - I think she died - she gave no indication of pain, and did not even refer to her injuries. The Chinese dislike our surgical appliances, our knives and saws, not, however, because of the pain they produce, but because that sort of treatment is foreign to their ideas. Let one of their doctors put a pitch piaster over an injury, no matter if it be a broken leg, a lost nose, or a hole through the lungs, and the man will be perfectly satisfled, and will accept whatever may come without a word of suffering or complaint. They're certainly a queer people." Sonie Anecdotes of Napoleon. In his busiest hours Napoleon Bonaparte was kind to children. At the battle of Austerlitz a little girl asked him for his autograph. "Certainly, my child," said he. Then turning1 to one of his aides, he cried: "Stop the battle for ten minutes. I wish to write' my name for this child." "It will take ten minute's, will it?" asked the child. "Yes, quite," returned Na'poleon. 'Tve a rauch bigger name than I used to have." At the battle of Waterloo, when the flay was over, an aide riding hastily to the emperor's side, cried out, breathlessly: "Sire, the battle is lost." "Good," returned the emperor. "Let 't stay lost. I don't want it any more." Listening to a discussion among his Dfflcers as to the value of a name, Bonaparte once said: "It has much. Do you suppose that I could ever have be;ome emperor of France if my name Sad been Skaggs? No, no. The Prench will stand a great deal, but Emperor Skaggs would have aroused their deep;st animosity." - Harper's Bazar. The Man on the Cask. In St. Paul an army officer was en.ertaining a party of friends to dinner, md among them was a civilian who vas an entertaining story teller, but ery improbable in nis statements. On :his occasion he told of being off the 2ape of Good Hope in an Indianman, vhen a floating object was discovered, vhich proved to be a cask whereon a nan was seated clinging to a small staff n the bunghole. Of course he was in'ited to come aboard, but he refused, ind said: "I'm very comfortable here. "m bound for the Cape. Can I take etters there for you?" Amid the silence vhich followed this incredible yarn a jray-haired colonel arose and said fravely: "For years I have been trying o flnd someone belonging to that ship to ,eturn thanks for the kindness shown ne on that occasion. At last I am enibled to do so. Sir, I was the man on nat cask."