THE IRISHMAN'S ENEMY.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 11738, 3 February 1900, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE IRISHMAN'S ENEMY.

An Irish priest bad bbnu cd with one of his flock >o intiucs him io give up whUky- ■' I tell you, Michael, said the priest, whisky is your worst enemy, and you should ktep as far ■away from it as you can. My enet-y, is it, fntlie- ? resj onded Minhael; an'i it w;-s your riveivnce's self that was tellin' us in the pulpit .only lrfit ISuaan-. to love oar enemies. So I was, Michael, rejoined tbe priest; but I didn't tell you to swallow them.

Two-thirds o: Spnin's population £an neither read nor write. Capital punishment in M«ssachusetts will hereafter be by the el-clric chair. •The coast line of ".Spain extends 1,317 miles — 712 on the Mediterranean and 605 on tht Atlantic. Every G?rman soldier carries a fourounce religious book with the rest of his personal equipment. Iv tbe library of the British Museum there are thi-ty-nine miles of shelving, and 1,759,000 volumes. A medical authority in Berlin declares that not one of Germany s professional cyclists has a sound heart. A Japanese bride gives her wedding presents to her parents as some slight recompense for their trouble m rearing her. A horse railroad, about a mile in length, accommodates the residents of a suburb of San Francisco. The grade is about three and a half per cent. A horse draws the car and passengers nphill ; the car descends by its own gravity, and then carries the horse on the rear platform of the car. The ascent is made at the rate of i\ miles an hour, , the descent averaging at the' rate of 15 miles an hour. In the chief cities of Japan several of tbe streets are devoted to the sale of certain lines of merchandise. ' In one street you will find nothing on sale but wooden shoe's ; another is devoted exclusively to wooden and willow ware ; another to paper lantern 3, while one street resembles a forest of bamboo, where the thousands of bamboo articles are sold. . The residents of a single square block in New York City, between Second and Third streets and Avenues B and C, number 3,358. The average income of' these people is only 14 dollars a month. On another square block, bounded by Fifth and Sixth avenues and Fiftythird and Fifty-fourth streets, there are •only 513 person's, and theifr wealth aggregates 400,000,000 dollars. A matrimonial lottery takes place four times a year in Smolensk, Russia. .A young maiden is ranled for, 5,000 tickets being issued, at one rouble each. The money is given to tbe girl as her dowry, and the bolder of the lncky ticket marries the girl. Sometimes, 1 for a consideration, he assigns her to • another man. In case she declines to marry the man who has won her, the •money is equally divided between them. There are some polite policemen in New York. Not long ago a woman • knocked down a man on Broadway, and was about to further chastise him * by jumping on bin: with both feet, when -a ppJicernuD interfered, and arrested her. ■ When she had told him that the •man was her husband the officer -promptly released her. apologized with 'tjie grace of a Chestei field, and then , passed on.