TRIALS OF BUSINESS.

REV. DR. TALMAGE DISCUSSES A TIME-

LY SUBJECT.

After Clouds of Distress There Will Follow the Sunshine of National Prosperity--What the Business Man Is Compelled to Undergo--The Soul's Welfare.

NEW YORK, July 7.--In his sermon for today Dr. Talmage, who is still absent on his western lecturing tour, chose a subject of universal interest--viz, "Business Troubles"--the text selected being Ezekiel xxvii, 24, "There were thy merchants in all sorts of things."

We are at the opening door of returning national prosperity. The coming crops, the re-establishment of public confidence and, above all, the blessing of God will turn in upon all sections of America the widest, greatest prosperity this country has ever seen. But that door of successes is not yet fully open, and thousands of business men are yet

suffering from the distressing times through which we have been passing.

Some of the best men in the land have faltered, men whose hearts are enlisted in every good work and whose hands have blessed every great charity. The church of God can afford to extend to them her sympathies and plead before heaven with all availing prayer. The schools such men have established, the churches they have built, the asylums

and beneficent institutions they have fostered will be their eulogy long after their banking institutions are forgotten. Such men can never fail. They have their treasures in banks that never break and will be millionaires forever. But I thought it would be appropriate today and useful for me to talk about the tri-

als and temptations of our business men and try to offer some curative prescriptions.

Rocks of Danger.

In the first place, I have to remark that a great many of our business men feel ruinous trials and temptations coming to them from small and limited capital in business. It is everywhere understood that it takes now three or four times as much to do business well as once it did. Once a few hundred dollars were turned into goods. The merchant would be his own storekeeper, his own salesman, his own bookkeeper. He would manage all the affairs himself, and everything would be net profit. Wonderful changes have come. Costly apparatus, extensive advertising, exorbitant store rents, heavy taxation, expensive agencies are only parts of the demand made upon our commercial men, and when they have found themselves in such circumstances with small capital they have sometimes been tempted to run against the rocks of moral and financial destruction. This temptation of limited capital has ruined men in two ways. Sometimes they have shrunk down under the temptation. They have yielded the battle before the first shot was fired. At the first hard dun they surrendered. Their knees knocked together at the fall of the auctioneer's hammer. They blanched at the financial peril. They did not understand that there is such a thing as heroism in merchandise and that there are Waterloos of the counter and that a man can fight no braver battle with the sword than he can with the yardstick. Their souls melted in them because sugars were up when they wanted to buy and down when they wanted to sell, and unsalable goods were on the shelf and bad debts in their ledger. The gloom of their countenances overshadowed even their dry goods and groceries. Despondency, coming from limited capital, blasted them. Others have felt it in a different way. They have said: "Here I have been trudging along. I have been trying to be honest all these years. I find it is of no use. Now it is make or break." The small craft that could have stood the stream is put out beyond the lighthouse on the great sea of speculation. He borrows a few thousand dollars from friends who dare not refuse him, and he goes bartering on a large scale. He reasons in this way: "Perhaps I may succeed, and if I don't I will be no worse off than I am now, for $100,000 taken from nothing, nothing remains."

Stocks are the dice with which he gambles. He bought for a few dollars vast tracts of western land. Some man at the east, living on a fat homestead, meets this gambler of fortune and is persuaded to trade off his estate for lots in a western city, with large avenues, and costly palaces, and lake steamers smoking at the wharves, and rail trains coming down with lightning speed from every direction. There it is all on paper! The city has never been built nor the railroads constructed, but everything points that way, and the thing will be done as sure as you live. Well, the man goes on, stopping at no fraud or outrage. In his splendid equipage he dashes past, while the honest laborer looks up and wipes the sweat from his brow and says, "I wonder where that man got all his money?" After awhile the bubble bursts. Creditors rush in. The law clutches, but finds nothing in its grasp. The men who were swindled say, "I don't know how I could have ever been deceived by that man," and the pictorials, in handsome woodcuts, set forth the hero who in ten years had genius enough to fail for $150,000! And that is the process by which many have been tempted through limitation of capital to rush into the labyrinths from which they could not be extricated. I would not want to chain honest enterprise. I would not want to block up any of the avenues for honest accumulation that open before young men. On the contrary, I would like to cheer them on and rejoice when they reach the goal, but when there are such multitudes of men going to ruin for this life and the life that is to come through wrong notions of what are lawful spheres of enterprise it is the duty of the church of God, and the ministers of religion, and the friends of all young men, to utter a plain, emphatic, unmistakable protest. These are the influences that drown men in destruction and perdition.

A Hazardous Undertaking. Again, a great many of our business men are tempted to overanxiety and care. You know that nearly all commercial businesses are overdone in this day. Smitten with the love of quick gain, our cities are crowded with men resolved to be rich at all hazards. They do not care how money comes if it only comes. Our best merchants are thrown into competition with men of more means and less conscience, and if an opportunity of accumulation be neglected one hour some one else picks it up. From January to December the struggle goes on. Night gives no quiet to limbs tossing in restlessness nor to a brain that will not stop thinking. The dreams are harrowed by imaginary loss and flushed with imaginary gains. Even the Sabbath cannot dam back the tide of anxiety, for this wave of worldliness dashes clear over the churches and leaves its foam on Bibles and prayer books. Men who are living on salaries or by the cultivation of the soil cannot understand the wear and tear of the body and mind to wish our merchants are subjected when they do not know but that their livelihood and their business honor are dependent upon the uncertainties of the next hour. This excitement of the brain, this corroding care of the heart, this strain of effort that exhausts the spirit, sends a great many of our best men in middle life into the grave, their life dashes out against money safes. They go with their store on their backs. They trudge like camels, sweating, from Aleppo to Damascus. They make their life a crucifixion. Standing behind desks and counters, banished from the fresh air, weighed down by carking crates, they are so many suicides. Oh, I wish I could today rub out some of these lines of care; that I could lift some of the burdens from the heart; that I could give relaxation to some of these worn muscles. It is time for you to begin to take it a little easier. Do your best and then trust God for the rest. Do not fret. God manages all the affairs of your life, and he manages them for the best. Consider the lilies. They always have robes.

Behold the fowls of the air! They always have nests. Take a long breath. Bethink betimes that God did not make you for a pack horse. Dig yourselves out from among the hogsheads and the shelves, and in the light of the holy Sabbath day resolve that you will give to the winds your fears, and your fretful-

ness, and your distresses. You brought nothing into the world, and it is very certain you can carry nothing out. Having food and raiment, be therewith content. The merchant came home from the store. There had been a great disaster there. He opened the front door and said in the midst of his family circle: "I am ruined. Everything is gone. I am all ruined." His wife said, "I am left," and the little child threw up its hands and said, "Papa, I am here." The aged grandmother, seated in the room, said, "Then you have all the promises of God beside, John." And he burst into tears and said: "God forgive me that I have been so ungrateful! I find I have a great many things left. God forgive me!"

Home Matters.

Again, I remark that many of our business men are tempted to neglect their home duties. How often it is that the store and the home seem to clash, but there ought not to be any collision. It is often the case that the father is the mere treasurer of the family, a sort of agent to see that they have dry goods and groceries. The work of family government he does not touch. Once or twice in a year he calls the children up on a Sabbath afternoon, when he has a half hour he does not exactly know what to do with, and in that half hour he disciplines his children and chides them and corrects their faults and gives them a great deal of good advice, and then wonders all the rest of the year that his children do not do better when they have the wonderful advantage of that semiannual castigation.

The family table, which ought to be the place for pleasant discussion and cheerfulness, often becomes the place of perilous expedition. If there be any blessing asked at all, it is cut off at both ends and with the hand on the carving knife. He counts on his fingers, making estimates in the interstices of the repast. The work done, the hat goes to the head, and he starts down the street, and before the family have arisen from the table he has bound up another bundle of goods and says to the customer, "Anything more I can do for you today, sir?" A man has more responsibilities than those which are discharged by putting competent instructors over his children and giving them a drawing master and a music teacher. The physical culture of the child will not be attended to unless the father looks to it. He must sometimes lose his dignity. He must unlimber his joints. He must sometimes lead them out to their sports and games. The parent who cannot forget the severe duties of life sometimes, to fly the kite and trundle the hoop and chase the ball and jump the rope with his children, ought never to have been tempted out of a crusty and unredeemable solitariness. If you want to keep your children away from places of sin, you can only do it by making your home attractive. You may preach sermons and advocate reforms and denounce wickedness, and yet your children will be captivated by the glittering saloon of sin unless you can make your home a brighter place than any other place on earth to them. Oh, gather all charms into your house. If you can afford it, bring books and pictures and cheerful entertainments to the household. But above all teach those children, not by half an hour twice a year on the Sabbath day, but day after day and every day teach them that religion is a great gladness; that it throws chains of gold about the neck; that it takes no spring from the foot, no blitheness from the heart, no sparkle from the eye, no ring from the laughter, but that "her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." I sympathize with the work being done in many of our cities by which beautiful rooms are set apart by our Young Men's Christian associations, and I pray God to prosper them in all things. But I tell you there is something back of that and before that. We need more happy, consecrated, cheerful Christian homes everywhere.

Of Eternal Importance. Again I remark that a great many of our business men are tempted to put the attainment of money above the value of the soul. It is a grand thing to have plenty of money. The more you get of it the better, if it come honestly and go usefully. For the lack of it sickness dies without medicine, and hunger finds its coffin in the empty bread tray, and nakedness shivers for lack of clothes and fire. When I hear a man in canting tirade against money--a Christian man--as though it had no possible use on earth and he had no interest in it at all, I come almost to think that the heaven that would be appropriate for him would be an everlasting poorhouse. While, my friends, we do admit there is such a thing as the lawful use of money--a profitable use of money--let us recognize also the fact that money cannot satisfy a man's soul; that it cannot glitter in the dark valley; that it cannot pay our fare across the Jordan of death; that it cannot unlock the gate of heaven. There are men in all occupations who seem to act as though they thought that a pack of bonds and mortgages could be traded off for a title to heaven as though gold would be a lawful tender in that place where it is so common that they make pavements out of it. Salvation by Christ is the only salvation. Treasures in heaven are the only incorruptible treasures. Have you ever ciphered out in the rule of loss and gain the sum, "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" However fine your apparel, the winds of death will flutter it like rags. Homespun and a threadbare coat have sometimes been the shadow of coming robes made white in the blood of the lamb. The pearl of great price is worth more than any gem you can bring from the ocean, than Australian or Brazilian mines strung in one carenet. Seek after God, find his righteousness, and all shall be well here--all shall be well hereafter.

Lost and Saved.

Some of you remember the shipwreck of the Central America. That noble steamer had, I think, about 500 passengers aboard. Suddenly the storm came, and the surges tramped the decks and swung into the hatches, and there went up a hundred voiced death shriek. The foam on the jaw of the wave. The pitching of the steamer as though it were leaping a mountain. The dismal flare of the signal rockets. The long cough of

the steam pipes. The hiss of extinguished furnaces. The walking of God on the

wave! The steamer went not down without a struggle. As the passengers stationed themselves in rows to bale out

the vessel, hark to the thump of the buckets, as men unused to toil, with

blistered hands and strained muscle, tug for their lives. There is a sail seen against the sky. The flash of the distress gun is noticed; its voice heard not, for it is choked in the louder booming of the sea. A few passengers escaped, but the steamer gave one great lurch and was gone! So there are some men who sail on prosperously in life. All's well, all's well. But at last some financial disaster comes--a euroclydon. Down they go! The bottom of the commercial sea is strewn with shattered bulks. But because your property goes do not let your soul go. Though all else perish save that, for I have to tell you of a more stupendous shipwreck than that which I just mentioned. God launched this world 6,000 years ago. It has been going on under freight of mountains and immortals, but one day it will stagger at the cry of fire. The timbers of rock will burn, the mountains flame like masts, and the clouds like sails in the judgment hurricane. Then God shall take the passengers off the deck, and from the berths those who have long been asleep in Jesus, and he will set them far beyond the reach of storm and peril. But how many shall go down will never be known until it shall be announced one day in heaven. The shipwreck of a world! So many millions saved! So many millions drowned! Oh, my dear hearers, whatever you lose, though your houses go, though your lands go, though all your earthly possessions perish, may God Almighty, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, save all your souls.

NAPOLEON'S ORIENTAL DREAMS. He Longed to Follow In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great. Bonaparte was a child of the Mediterranean. The light of its sparkling waters was ever in his eyes, and the fascination of its ancient civilizations was never absent from his dreams of glory. His proclamations ring with classic allusions; his festivals were adorned with classic ceremony. In infancy he had known of Genoa, the tyrant of his island, as strong in the splendid commercial enterprises which stretched eastward through the Levant and beyond into the farther orient. In childhood he had fed his imagination on the histories of Alexander the Great and his conquest of oriental empires. In youth he had thought to find an open door for his ambition when all others seemed closed by taking service with England to share the renown of those who were building up her eastern empire. Disappointed in this, he turned with the same lack of success to Russia, already England's rival on the continent of Asia. It is perfectly comprehensible that throughout his early manhood his mind should have occasionally reverted to the same ideals. The conqueror of Italy and Austria might hope to realize them. Was he not master of the two great maritime commonwealths which had once shared all eastern trade between them? England's intrusion upon the Mediterranean basin was a never ceasing irritation to all the Latin powers. Her commercial prosperity and her mastery of the seas aggravated the exasperation of France as threatening even her equality in their ancient rivalry. From the days of the first crusade all Frenchmen had felt that leadership in the recon-

struction of Asia belonged to them by virtue of preoccupation. Ardent republicans, moreover, saw France's mission incomplete in the liberalizing of the continent, and the department of marine under the directory stamped its paper with the motto, "Liberty of the Seas." Imaginative forces, the revolutionary system and the national ambition all combined to create ubiquitous enthusiasm for the conquest of the Mediterranean. To this the temperament and training of Bonaparte were as the spark to the tinder. It was with willing ears that the directory heard his first suggestions about the Venetian isles and subsequently his plan for the capture of Malta, which was to be followed by a death blow to England's supremacy in the seizure of Egypt and the dismemberment of Turkey.--W. M. Sloane's "Life of Napoleon" in Century.

THE RUSSIAN KNOUT. A BRUTAL PUNISHMENT INFLICTED IN THE CZAR'S DOMAIN. Claim That Its Use In Some Respects Has Been Abolished--The Use of the Cruel Instrument Described by a Political Exile Who Has Suffered In Siberia.

One never knows for certain how much of the knout is left in modern Russia. The telegraph wire still at times carries the horrid whiz of it from remote Siberia, and only the other day I

saw mention in news from St. Peters-

burg of a new imperial ukase, "abolishing the use of the knout for the punish-

ment of offenses committed by the peas-

antry, which has hitherto been completely at the mercy of the local judges in this respect." I was under the impres-

sion that the "local judges" had been deprived of their knout for 20 years or more, but the sender of this message adds that "statistics were submitted to the czar, showing that in ten years 3,000 persons, mostly guilty of theft of produce, had died after punishment with the knout."

Granted the infliction of the knout, the 3,000 deaths are easily believed. The instrument itself, supposing this report to be true, evidently dies harder than its victims. But even in Russia, where the rod and its equivalents have had a more extended and bloody exist-

ence than in any other European state, the humaner spirit of the age has been felt, and one is disposed to regard as exaggerated the statements just quoted.

Certainly we had been given to believe that the knout was abolished for all but the graves offense long ago in 1866.

But Russia has never been governed wholly by its written laws, and there are regions of that empire where a ukase may be slow to reach the "local judges."

The more merciful edict of 1866, however, stopped short at the confines of Siberia, and it was with the object of learning to what extent the knout is used in the Siberia of today that I sought an interview with a distinguished and very interesting exile, M. Alexander Sochaczewski, on a visit to England. M. Sochaczewski, a Pole by birth, an artist by profession, and in England to arrange for the exhibition of a picture which will move the sympathies of every friend of the victims of the czar, was a political exile in Siberia at the age of 21 and suffered 4½ years in the mines, during 2½ of which he carried, night and day, chains of which marks are permanently graven on his ankles.

Twenty years in all were the days of his exile, and he counts himself happy that he did not, like so many of his comrades in oppression, perish under that cruel yoke. Indeed he speaks without bitterness and says that even in Siberia one may often forget oneself.

M. Sochaczewski could say much about the knout. He had been many times a witness of its infliction. The knout, in fact, was in use in the mines during the whole of M. Sochaczewski's exile, and those who were condemned to it suffered in public. At the present day M. Sochaczewski believed that it was practically abolished in 1893, but the governor retains a certain discretionary power, which may mean much in Siberia. Would M. Sochaczewski describe the punishment? He took a half sheet of note paper and a pen and made a rapid sketch. "That is the knout," he said. A band of leather, as is well known, serves the executioner for a handle, and the knout itself is a single thong of leather, rough and very hard, tapering toward the extremity, where it is weighted with a ball of lead. With this the executioner--who is generally a reprieved murderer--can inflict as great or as little suffering as he pleases. "Thus," said M. Sochaczewski, "the prisoners would sometimes give him a ruble to prove his skill, when he would strike one of them, apparently with full force, across the palm of the hand, but the blow would scarcely be felt and would not leave a scratch. With the same instrument he could kill at a single stroke, and was occasionally bribed by a condemned prisoner to do so, breaking the ribs and almost tearing out the heart.

What number of strokes, I asked M. Sochaczewski, were ordinarily inflicted? He replied that it was of no great consequence, inasmuch as punishment with the knout was generally regarded as a sentence of death. A man under sentence of 100 lashes might die at the third lash, in which case the remaining 97 would be given to the corpse. It was possible, if the executioner did not employ his whole art or strength, for the victim to escape death, but he would then inevitably be a cripple for the rest of his life. There were men in the hospital in his time whom the knout had maimed forever. I asked whether the knout exhausted the resources of penal discipline in Siberia. "By no means," said M. Sochaczewski.

He took up his pen again, and scratched me a picture of a whip called the plet, which has three tails of twisted leather, with bits of metal at the tips. It is a little less deadly than the knout, but an expert flogger can kill his victim at the fifth stroke. There is a difference in flogging wit the knout and with the plet. The knout, like the English "cat," is laid across the back. The three tails of the plet score the back downward from the nape of the neck to the loins, and every stroke, properly given, carries away three strips of skin and bites well into the flesh. Yes. M. Sochaczewski had seen many comrades suffer under the plet. "Protest? To what end?" To protest was to be tied up oneself. The very flogger ran the risk of being cut to pieces with the knout or plet if he failed to kill or maim his victim.--St. Paul's.

How It Was.

"And where's Sappeigh?" inquired the returned clubman, who was posting himself. "Is he still courting that bright western girl?"

"Oh, no," replied his friend. "She jollied him for six months or more and fooled him at last."

"Ah," with a sympathetic sigh, "she rejected him, did she?" "Not much. She married him."--De-troit Free Press.

Indoor Bicycle Riding. Nowadays every one wants to ride a bicycle, but many do not attempt it because they dread the ordeal of learning. In the first place they dislike the idea of abrasions and bruises, and in the second they can hardly bring themselves to the sacrifice of dignity which the flounderings of the beginner usually entail. They need no longer hesitate. The bicycle can now be learned indoors, safe from prying eyes and without fear of falls. A new appliance designed for this purpose consists of a small flywheel covered with rubber and two side wheels fitted with a simple arrangement by means of which it can be adjusted to any kind of cycle in two minutes. Its great advantage is that the rider experiences the same momentum as in a spin on a hard road, while the machine either remains stationary or moves so slowly that in traversing 15 feet the same amount of exercise is obtained as in a mile of ordinary traveling. Practice can thus be carried on in a hall or room, and riders can gauge the rate of speed their exertions would have given them on the highway. For beginners, children and invalids needing physical exercise this invention is specially adapted, as it stands perfectly steady and enables the difficulties of mounting and dismounting to be thoroughly overcome without danger of falls or bruises. The appliance is collapsible, weighs 15 pounds and can be easily carried in the hand.--Exchange.

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Miss Mary M. Haskell. Miss Mary M. Haskell of Minneapolis has just been appointed census taker for Cass county, Minn. The population of the county is widely scattered, and the trip will have to be made on horseback. Much of it is an unbroken wilderness, and there are many Indians in the country, some of whom will have to be enumerated. The undertaking is a formidable one, and very few women would be willing to attempt it.

The Man He Wanted. "I beg your pardon," said one man to another in a railroad train, "but I am the manager of a museum, and I have a vacancy now for a strong man." "Well, what of it?" "Why, sir, I saw you open the car window with no apparent effort, and I thought perhaps we could agree on the terms and you could begin your engagement immediately."--Detroit Free Press.

I must have known life otherwise in epochs long since fled, for in my veins some orient blood is red, and through my thought are lotus blossom blown.--T. B. Aldrich.

The Sahara is so named from the Arabic word signifying "desert."

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South Holland's Danger.

We trust that the Dutch "scientific writer" Van Rijckvorsel may be mis-

taken. That gentleman has deemed it his duty, in view of the popular uneasiness produced throughout Holland by the recent storms, to come forward in

the character of an alarmist.

For many years he has been making

what he calls a "magnetic study" of the

country. His investigations have convinced him that unless proper precautions are taken the province of South Holland runs a serious risk of disap-

pearing permanently from the map of Europe.

Much money has been expended in

preserving the islands of Walcheren and

Vlieland from the sea's incroachments.

The weakest and most threatened point on the whole coast, however, is really Scheveningen, near The Hague. The en-

tire coast line between that village and Rotterdam is in more immediate danger of being engulfed by the sea. Were such an event to take place it would be a very different matter from a "polder" being submerged and subsequently drained as soon as the dikes are prepared.--Pall Mall Gazette.

A SPIDER FARM. A Sirup Bottler Has Recruited the Spider Against His Foes With Success.

A sirup bottler has improved upon the prison lesson of Bruce. He has taken the spider into partnership in the working of one of his most important departments. Flies, cockroaches and other insects, attracted by his sweets, and encouraged by the genial atmosphere of his bottling room, used to interfere with his work, get into his bottles, steal his

goods and "worry him to death." He

has recruited the spider against his foes and vanquished them. Some 6,000 spiders now make their home on the ceiling and walls of his bottling department. Their webs are everywhere, and they behave themselves with great intelligence.

Said the bottler to an interviewer: "These creatures know more than a great many people. Spiders do not care for sweet things, and never drop into my vats or get into my bottles. I never disturb them except to feed them occasionally. They appear to know my call, and will come out and feed from my hand, or take a fly from my finger. "They shut themselves up during most of the winter months in the little nests you see stuck like daubs of mud

about the ceiling. When winter comes, I brush away the webs. They prefer to weave new ones every spring.

"Each May they reappear ready to unravel the silken fabric that is stored in their little bodies. It is just about

then that the flies have hatched their first young. If the spiders appear earlier, the crop of flies would soon give out.

"I have been only running this spider farm for two years, but I find my little partners indispensable. They will not endure in the place a single fly or insect that is a plunderer of sweets and sirups."--Pittsburg Dispatch.

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Private Electric Motors. A well known electrical authority has pointed out that it is now as easy and cheap to have an electric elevator in a private house as in a large office building. Stairs are literally a barbarism, to which women frequently owe ill health, and to which many delicate persons may attribute their deprivation of the full enjoyment of their homes. The cost of operating an electric elevator in, say, a five story house, making 50 or 60 trips every day, will not exceed $3 or $4 per month. The devices for operating these elevators have been so improved that an invalid or a child can manage them.

The old lever arrangement can be dispensed with, and the elevator ascends or descends on the pressure of a button. It will stop only at each floor and will

stall only when the elevator door is

closed.--New York Times.

Force of Habit.

The genial captain of a steamer plying on one of our American rivers was appointed a vestryman in an Episcopal church in a city which lay at one end of his route. One day shortly afterward it was reported to him, when on shore, that there was a leak in the church. He was accustomed to promptness, and on receipt of the message he went to the church, took a candle and started down into the cellar to find the leak, evidently thinking of the basement as the hull of the good ship Zion. The captain himself tells the story with much apparent enjoyment of its humor.--Youth's Companion.

Famous Living Pictures.

"Living pictures" cannot be called an invention of "these modern days" since it is claimed that they were first employed by Mme. de Gelnis for the purpose of educating the Duc d'Orleans' children, whose governess she was. With the help of several famous artists she arranged pictures of historic scenes which ladies of the French court posed for.--Ladies' Home Journal.

A Tattooed Snake.

The sailors of the gulf of Mexico and the equatorial regions of the Atlantic ocean amuse themselves and also turn an occasional honest penny by capturing both large and small snakes of the variety known as the lemon boa and covering their bodies with tattooed letters and designs. One of these living manuscripts was recently exhibited at Egyptian hall, London, which had the whole of the third chapter of Genesis and some pieces from Punch tattooed upon his back in indelible letters of various col-

ors. Thousands of these tattooed snakes are annually disposed of at Rio de Janeiro. The buyers generally kill these snakes and either skin them or preserve the entire reptile in alcohol. Such speci-

mens are highly prized by both European and North American collectors of curiosities.--St. Louis Republic.

Housekeeping at Samoa. Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson says that housekeeping in Samoa was not so idyllic as it might seem. Her supplies came from New Zealand or Australia once a month, so that if she wanted a bottle of bluing or a bag of flour, for instance, she had to send half across the Pacific to get it. The native diet was all well enough for a few weeks, but as it consisted almost solely of fruit and fish it began to pall on European palates.

Housekeeping in this South Sea paradise (of romances) had other drawbacks, particularly in the matter of expense, which was fully six or seven times as great, Mrs. Stevenson says, as living on a corresponding scale in San Francisco.

As for society, "there's more of it to the square inch in Samoa than in any other place I know," says Mrs. Stevenson, but it appears to be largely of the living picture kind.

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STEAM AND GAS FITTER.

Repairing a specialty.

Bath Tubs and Plumbers'

Supplies.

730 Asbury Avenue.

SMITH & THORN, 846 Asbury Avenue,

PLUMBING & DRAINAGE. All kinds of Pump, Sink, Drivewell Points and Plumbing Material constantly on hand. All kinds of Jobbing in our line promptly attended to. Best of Material used. Experienced workmen constantly on hand.

OCEAN CITY A Moral Seaside Resort. Not Excelled as a Health Restorer. Finest facilities for

FISHING, Sailing, gunning, etc. The Liquor Traffic and its kindred evils are forever pro-

hibited by deed.

Every lover of Temperance and Morals should combine to

help us.

Water Supply,

Railroad, Steamboats And all other

Modern Conveniences. Thousands of lots for sale at various prices, located in all

parts of the city.

For information apply to E. B. LAKE,

Secretary,

Ocean City Asso'n, SIXTH ST. & ASBURY AVE.

W. L. DOUGLAS $3 SHOE

IS THE BEST. FIT FOR A KING.

$5. CORDOVAN, FRENCH & ENAMELLED CALF. $4. $3.50 FINE CALF & KANGAROO. $3.50 POLICE, 3 SOLES. $2.50 $2. WORKINGMEN'S. EXTRA FINE $2. $1.75 BOYS' SCHOOL SHOES. LADIES $3. $2.50 $2. $1.75 BEST DONGOLA.

SEND FOR CATALOGUE. W. L. DOUGLAS, BROCKTON, MASS.

Over One Million People wear the W. L. Douglas $3 & $4 Shoes All our shoes are equally satisfactory They give the best value for the money. They equal custom shoes in style and fit. Their wearing qualities are unsurpassed. The prices are uniform--stamped on sole. From $1 to $3 saved over other makes.

If your dealer cannot supply you we can. Sold by C. A. CAMPBELL.