TABLE TALK.

Grey River Argus, Volume VIII, Issue 589, 26 October 1869, Page 4

TABLE TALK.

(From Once a Week.) If you should care to know how many people possess the original hammer that drove the last spike of the Pacific railway, I can toll you. The number is seventeen. Seventeen cities of the States claim to contain the identical tool ! As an example of the administration of Church-Rate funds, I may montipn that the churchwardens in a parish of which a friend of mine is rector, pay annually out of the Church-Rate Ll9 to the parish mole-catcher. If you should desire at any time to write a document in such a manner as to render attempts at altering or falsifying your manuscript impossible, bear in mind a hint given in a French paper-makers' journal, that b.v steeping paper in a very very weak solution of gallic acid, you obtain a writing surface upon which ordinary ink makes a mark that defies deceitful erasure or alteration, by rendering any attempt at such easily detectable. We are not told in what way, but it is prob» able that the gallic acid treatment causes the ink to penetrate, the paper so that the writing cannot be scratched out. This hint ought to be of use to novel writers, who hinge the interest of three volumes upon an erasure in a will or a settlement ; but it most concerns the law stationers and the bankers' cheque printers, Advertising is carried to a great excess in P.*>ris ; and yet such a tiling a3 a newspaper with a couple of pages of advertisements is altogether unknown. A double supplement of the Times is one of those matters which French journalists cannut be ma.de to understand. The man who conceived the idea of the little kiosques on the boulevards', in which newspapers are now sold, but which were originally erected solely for the purpose of displaying advertisements on their glass panes, received a small fortune from the com*pany who carried out his suggestion, and who, nevertheless, pay their shareholders something like a dividend of 20 per cent. Jt is. the success of this speculation that Jias, no doubt, induced a company to buy up the drop-scenes of certain Paris theatres, which no longer display handsome tableaux in which some of the best known characters of the French stage are represented, but, in lien of theso, are covered with announcements of the merits of the Lait antipheliqne, the Chocolat Perron, the Eau de Mehsse des Cannes, Machines a, coudre silencieuses, the ToileCataplasme, the Vinaigre Balsamiquo, Velocipedes inrenversables, the Insecticide Vicat, the Moutarde B<>rdin, and the other thousandrand-one advertisements that have fatigued the eyes of Parisians for years. Cancerine is the latest big^named commodity hailing from America. It does not stand for a pretty color, like coralline, fuscheine, or roseiue ; but for a manure, a compost of dead crabs. Be it known that the shores of Delaware Bay swarm with crustaceans of a species known as the king-crab, sometimes called, from similarity, the horse-foot crab. The eggs cover the sand so thickly that they are shovelled up by the waggon-load, and carried away to feed chickens. The young fish are taken to fatten hogs ; the old oues are gathered into pens, where they soon die, and theu they are dried, ground down, and packed up in bags to be sold at the rate of about five pounds per ton for manure. With about four hundredweight an acre applied to the ground the fertilizing power is reported to be double that of guano, and it is asserted that many thousands of tons can be furnished annually from Delaware, if no injudicious onslaught is made upon the crabs to permanently reduce their numbers. I went into a shop the other day to buy what the. drapers call " gents' hose." A pniiling young lady wa3 behind the counter ; and when I had made an appeal to her to show me some socks, I was somewhat doubtful what course of action I ought to pursue in order to demonstrate to her the length of my foot. As lam not a burlesque writer, it was clear that I could not lay my boot on the counter and Bay " with all my sole ;" nor could I .paraphrase Dibdin's Jack Tar, when he spokp of the dancer who "so daintily handled her feet." The little woman, however, speedily removed my first perplexity ; though only to plunge me into another. " Will you," said she, " please to double up your fist and lay it on the counter '/" I replied that I did not want gloves, but socks. " And I want to take your measure," she said. " But," I urged, " It is the measure of my foot that yon require," " Yes," she replied, " and I can get it equally as well from your hand. Once round your clenched fist, at the knuckles, is the length of your foot." And she took the measure of my fist, and I took the socks op the faith of the damsel's representation ; and, in due course, I found that she was quite right, and had fitted me to a nicetj-, A correspondent point 3 out that the suggested derivation of the name of horsechesnut, from the figure of a horde's foot seen at the. intersection of the twigs, is more ingenious than correct. The prefix horse in a number of compound words means simply h>rge or coarse, as horseleech, horse-laugh, horse-fly, horse-radish, and it may in this sense be etymologically identified with gross. A horse-chesnut is therefore a gross, large or coarse, chesnut —the resemblance, of the fruit, to, the sweet chesnut haying doubtless suggested the name. The medical galvanists and all who have any faith in the curative powers of electricity, will be gla.d tq hear that the French Minister of Public Instruction- is about to institute some curious experiments, suggested by one Dr Poggidi, on electrification as a cure for diseases not only of the body but of,tbe iniud. According to the doctor-, you. have only to submit children physically and morally weak to the action of electricity from an ordinary machine to see them grow and strengthen, and acquire an aptitude for work and a facility' of learning to which they were strangers before the treatment. He had tested his system in many cas.es of youths suffering from mental depression, nervous excitement, and the attendant corporeal evils, and, as he and his supporters say, has been successful to an astounding degree. When he first divulged his system of electrical gymnastics, and told his. S.tories to the Paris Academy of Sciences, he was laughed at. This was three years ago ; in the interval he has seemingly gained a better hearing, jind now the Lyceum of the Prince Imperial, at Vannes, is to be made a provingfiouse for his system. May we hear more j about it ! Meanwhile, if any bcUool- '

" master has an extra complement of dolts oniiis forms, let him. by all means try whether stirring up their -brains with electricity will brighten them. The boys will prefer the treatment to flogging. The Abyssinian sinowsrof-war bill has been paid ; and it is found that the rescued Englishmen have cost nearly a million a head j It would be difficult, : even for George Selwyn,. to extract a joke from such a serious- subject, though he was once witty at the expense of Bruce, tho traveller, whose Abyssinian- experiences were not, in the first instance, received with full belief in their truth. The talk at table had turned on Abyssinian musical instruments ; and Bruce was asked about them. " I think," said the traveller, "that I saw one lyre there." Upon which Selwyn whispered to his neighbor, " There is one less now that he has left the country." The famous tenor, Adolphe Noutrit, was in his youth remarkably handsome, but of a singuarly feminine beauty, and his features were delicate in the extreme. He was one night behind the scenes at the theatre Francais when Talma, who was repeating his part to himself, before entering, on the stage, perceived him. He instantly called to the Suisse, who was on guard at the side wings during the performance, and very vehemently expressed his astonishment and anger at the carelessness with which the Suisse fiulfilled Uis duties, " How dare you let a woman in here f " A woman sir ! but where is she ?" asked the affrighted official. " Dont you see her standing there, with her back against the wall ?" replied the tragedian. "But, Sir, that is M. Nourrit? M. Adolphn Nourrit ; he comes constantly here." (( Dont tell me ! why, his father is my best friend. That is not Adolphe Nourrit ; that is a woman ; send her away directly !" Talma's orders were obeyed, and the said woman was expelled the house of Moliere. The next day young Adolphe's father desired to see Talma, who was not long in preceiving the marked coldness of his old friend towards him. Having at last asked him the reason of his altered manner : " Well to tell you the truth," answered Nourrit, the father, " I came to see whether you were in your right senses ; and now that I see you are, I wish to know what you ment by causing my son to be turned out of the theatre in so strange a fashion last night !" " What !" exclaimed Talma, "—it was not a woman?" Acknowledging his mistake, however, he made the completest apologies, but never enjoyed hearing the story quoted against him, as it often was. If Nourrit was once taken for a woman, Madame de Stael was more than once taken for a man. One evening in particular, she was going to the (jraivE opera to a fancy ball, in a black domino. Her face was hidden by a mask, but on entering at the door, the gentleman who was her cavalier, paid for himself alone, it being understood that ladies did not pay. The pah' were going by, when the comptroller stopped Mada-ne de Stael, seizing on the sleeve of her domino, and telling hur he was not to be taken in by such a gross imposition. He was irate in the extreme, and said, " You are a man, and must pay as such." Upon this the celebrated Baroness was at a loss how to prove her identity, so she showed him her hand ungloved. Worse and worse ! for the man whose conviction might have been shaken by the warm accent of truth she had put into her defence of herself, declared now that she should either be turned away from the theatre, or pay as a man, for that a man she certainly was. And pay she accordingly did, and Corinne was obliged to pass for belonging to that hateful sex against which she waged such war in her romances. An invention much wanted is a small power generator for household use, which I would call a domestic motor. The machine-tool spirit of our time has invaded the kitchen and the boudoir. Ingenious people have given us washing machines and patent mangles, rotary knife-cleanei's, egg-beaters, fruit-peelers, pea-shellcvs, cherry-stoners, grinding and mincing machines, and last, and most important for this matter, sewing machines. For many of these, and especially for the last, some driving power is wanted as a substitute for muscle, which all people do not possess in sufficient quantity to do the work they think they can by means of the falsely called labor-saving machines. It is .very difficult to make folks comprehend that a certain definite amount of force is required to do any definite amount of work — be it cleaning a knife or quilting a petticoat ; and that if you do the job in one-fourth the timu by machine that it would occupy by hand, you have to exert four times the strength during the shorter time that yon would during the longer. -.A niachiue sewer will tell you that she has done a day's work in an hour ; true, but in the task she has consumed a day's worth of ordinary hand sewing labor, and more, because she has had to move a lot of machinery along with her needle. How much energy is required for ordinary hand stitching }— scarcely a measurable quantity. How much power ia wanted to run an average sewing machine? No less, ladies, than one-eighth part of the power of a horse. The greater share of this is spent in friction of parts of the machine and in stoppages and startiiigs. If we were to take other cases, such as those of knife-cleaners or creamwhippers, we should find the same disproportion between the nominal and the effective saving of power. I am not decrying these excellent mechanical contrivances — far from it ; I only want to show that they are not savers of labor, but only savers of time at the expense of extra labor. If they are to be made real economisers they must be moved otherwise than by muscular exertion; the inventive minds who devise the tools ought to contrive a simple source of power to drive them. A. word forthe National Lifeboat Institution. It can boast of having saved 18,255 lives since its formation. Last year alone its boats saved 603 lives, and in the first half of the present year they, have saved 322. That is surely a maguificent boast.