Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 15, 1879
Out at the Lafayette Park Police station in St. Louis, they have a weather prophet which eclipses Tice and all the barometers in the neighborhood. It is a frog of the genus Hyla, more familiar to the general reader as the tree toad. The Superintendent of the Park, was mildly abusing his barometer one day for misleading him, when the officer on the beat an old frontiersman, said he would show him a trick. He took a glass jar and threw into it some stones and a couple of inches of water. Then he whittled out a little wooden ladder and put it into the jar. After some lively scrambling a tree toad was caught, chucked in and a tin top screwed on. The weather indicator was complete. When it is going to be fair weather the toad roosts on the top round of the ladder solemnly blinking the hours away. From twelve to fifteen hours before a change of bad weather, “the general,” as they call him, begins to climb down, and hours before the storm sets in he squats himself on a stone, and, with his head just above the surface of the water, peers aloft at the coming storm. Let the weather be changeable and shifting, as “Old Prob” says, and the old toad goes up and down the ladder like a scared middy. When it is fair and the toad roosts aloft his skin is of a light grayish green. When the change comes the skin turns black as the toad goes down the ladder, becoming a jet shining black by the time it reaches the bottom. The fame of the toad has spread through the Lafayette Park neighborhood.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 15, 1879
One of the singular proofs of the foreign importation and perhaps of the late arrival in Europe of the cat, is found in its various names, says the London Daily News. It is said that none of them came from the old Aryan source, from which most of our language is derived. Most of them, like the familiar cat, are connected with the late Latin catus, which took the place of the earlier felis, when cats drove out the former foes of rats and mice.
It seems to follow that cats came into the west with the Romans, but whence did the Romans get the name and the animal? M. Pictet traces the name to the Syrian qato, and the Arabic qitt, out of which by an easy and natural process we make kitten. Qitt and qato, however, are not the primative native forms of the cat’s long-descended title, and we must go from Syria to Africa to find gada, kadiska and kaddiska. As for the ancient Egyptian “man,” that is merely the “mew cat” and the “pussy mew” of English nurseries. Here, then, in Egypt is a native onomatopoeic name of the cat, such as any human being might give it when he first heard the peevish, prolonged note of its voice.
The Indian names of the cat are not very old, and they are easily explained. The cat is “the house wolf,” the “rat eater” [though snakes are ratters of some districts,] and the foe of mice.” The most endearing title of the cat comes from the land whence the most pleasing specimens of the race are derived. The Persian cat, wild or tame, is “puschak,” which the Afghans pronounce “pischik” and the Lithuanians, as old an Aryan-speaking race as any in Europe, “puiji.” The English “puss” is clearly of the same family of words. If “puss” in the long run is derived from a Sanscrit word for a “tail,” there is a curious coincidence between the word used by Herodotus for the Egyptian cat, “the creature with waving tail,” and the term found in Persian, Lithuanian, and English.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 15, 1879
Mr. James Morton, of Simonton’s Corner, Me., shot a tiger cat in the Barne district, measuring four feet and ten inches in length.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 22, 1879
They have on exhibition in St. Louis a cloak made of feathers of quail, prairie chickens, and wild ducks. There are said to be 38,880 feathers, and each feather has from five to eight stitches. It took a lady nearly seven months to make it, and she valued it at $500.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, November 17, 1877
A boy named Ziba Lake, about 11 years of age, captured and killed an eagle on the farm of C. F. Heydecker, Esq. in Newport, a few days since. The circumstances were about as follows: The lad noticed the eagle resting upon the back of a sheep, but never having an eagle in that locality he supposed it to be a hen-hawk. Armed with a club he cautiously advanced and struck his bird, partially, or entirely stunning it, he then grabbed it by one wing and dragged it to the house, where, after keeping it a prisoner for a day or two, then dispatched it. The wonder of the neighborhood is that the eagle did not have the boy for dinner. The bird measured six feet and nine inches from tip to tip of wings and has a powerful beak and talons.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, December 1, 1877
A North Carolina wagoner sold his dog to a Laurens county man the other day for half a barrel of sorghum syrup. The dog however, refused to be sold and took refuge under the wagon. The Laurens county man crawled after him with a piece of meat in one hand and a rope in the other. Although there were several spectators of the scene that ensued it is difficult to get to the facts. All agree that there was a scuffle under the wagon, accompanied by yelps and yells; but no one is willing to affirm that the man had the dog or the dog had the man. Finally, the dog, as it would seem, brushed up against the hind legs of the mule and then all was still. It is not certain what killed the dog. One of the spectators said he thought he heard a trace chain rattle, but when he went around to examine the mule she was asleep. The man had lost his hat, his coat and the greater part of his trousers, and subsequent examination proved that the dog died with one ear and a handful full of hair in his mouth.-Atlanta Constitution.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 23, 1878
    The veritable “Mary [who] had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow,” visited the Old South spinning bee at Boston Wednesday afternoon and told the ladies present the story of the lamb. When she was 9 years old and living on a farm, one morning she went out into the barn, where she found two little lambs, one of them nearly dead. So she took it into the house and sat up all night nursing it with catnip tea. The next morning the lamb could stand on its feet, and grew stronger every day. Owing to her loving care the lamb became so attached to Mary that it followed her about and one day to school, where she had it under the desk, so that none of the children knew it was in school until Mary was called up to recite. Then the laamb came out from its hiding place, and made the children laugh and shout, so that the teacher was obliged to turn it out. The poem was written by a friend of Mary’s [the venerable Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, who has just retired from the editorship of Godfey’s Lady Book] soon after the lamb’s visit to the school-room. Mary was married many years since, and lives near Boston. She says she will come again to the spinning bee some afternoon. She took in some of the first fleece of her little lamb, and it is now for sale at the spinning bee.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 16, 1878
    In the New Jersey calender Tuesday was “sheep day,” so called because upon one day in each year the township committees are in session to receive complaints from farmers and sheep-owners. These complaints state the number and value of the sheep which have been killed by dogs during the year. These losses are paid according to an act passed in 1846, from a fund obtained by taxes upon dogs owned in the township. Should this fund be insufficient to pay these damages, it is divided among those injured in equitable proportions, according to their respective losses.-Persons are taxed fifty cents for one dog above the age of six months, and one dollar for every additional dog owned by them; but the people may at their annual town meeting levy any addiitional tax on dogs, not exceeding $5 on each.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 9, 1878
    The Canadaigna Journal of last week tells the following: “Along the sidewalk leading from the Globe Hotel to the hotel stable is a board fence. North of this fence is a yard where Mr. Decker frequently turns his horse loose for exercise. The ground in the yard next to the fence is a foot or two higher than the sidewalk. The horse occsionally stands there with his head over the fence. On Tuesday last the man who runs the Naples stage was passing along the walk. Just as he passed, the horse reached down his head, seized him by the coat collar, lifted him a foot or two from the ground, and, after shaking him a little, dropped him in the snow by the fence, and then scampered away, kicking up his heels.”
Friday, December 16, 2011
Published in the Waukegan Gazette, Waukegan, Illinois on Saturday, March 2, 1878
    A lively young boar was recently sent my rail from Custrin to Frankfort-on-the-Oder, being shut up in a wooden cage. On the journey he managed to get out of the cage, and forthwith devoured twenty-five pounds of German yeast which happened to be in the car. The yeast began to rise in the interier of the boar, and so enormous was the artificial inflation that the animal died in the car. The examiner sums up the case for the lawyers. Is the owner of the carcass to proceed against the owner of the yeast for the loss of the boar, or is the ex-proprietor of the yeast to proceed against the owner of the pig for the loss of his merchandise? The railway company repudiates all responsibility, and eminent counsel hold that the claim of both paties lies against the constructor of the faulty cage; but the builder contends that the cage was never calculated to withstand the frantic efforts of a pig which had so much yeast under its nose.