NOTES. Some very peculiar methods are practiced by the present French government. A deputy who had borrowed one hundred francs from a col league wrote saying that he inclosed a bank-note to discharge a debt. After the letter was mailed, he discovered that he had forgotten to put the money in the envelope, and accordingly called on his friend to give him the amount. The cred itor, however, asserted that the• bank-note had
"Pick-Me-up," London, comes to the conclu sion that it is more dangerous to be innocent in the United States than to be a convicted murderer. There were, argues the paper, forty per cent fewer legal executions in the United States last year than lynchings. Of the men lynched, a much larger proportion than one in fifty was innocent, while not one convicted murderer in fifty was executed.
been duly forwarded in the letter. Thereupon the two demanded an explanation of the postoffice. It turned out that an official had opened and read the letter, and, finding no inclosure, supposed that he had lost it. The authorities accordingly supplied him another bank-note, which was duly sealed in the envelope and for warded.
Commitment for contempt of court has be come so common an incident in some of the New York and Brooklyn courts that it may be timely for some judges to recall John Philpot Curran's repartee to Irish Judge Robinson, who had threatened to commit him. At which the witty barrister rejoined, " Should your Lordship so do, we shall both of us have the consolation of reflecting that I am not the worst thing your Lordship has committed."
Venice has asserted the right of ownership over the famous pigeons of St. Mark. Some enterprising street-boys who had made a business of killing the birds, when brought up in court, pleaded that the pigeons had no legal owners, as they were fed by the public on the Piazza San Marco. The city authorities maintained that the pigeons were the wards of the old republic, and therefore of the present municipality, a view that was adopted by the court. In some places in Spain, among them Vergara, where Golli, the Anarchist, was garrotted, an old custom prevails of arresting the executioner im mediately after the execution and charging him with murder before the court of justice. " Yes, I killed a man," answers the executioner, " but I did it in the name of the law, for the benefit of society, and in obedience to the commands of your honor." Then the court discharges him, saying that justice has been done. The following memoranda accompanied a decision rendered in one of the courts of record of a neighboring State. It certainly is unique. "In this case the agent of the plaintiff is a fool and the defendant a knave. Both deserve punishment, but as knavery is always rated higher than folly, I find for the plaintiff, thus dealing out justice to the defendant, and leaving to the plaintiff's attorneys to reward the fool according to his folly."
Legislation looking to the taxation of bache lors has been seriously proposed of late in several of the States of the Federal Union. In Illinois, for example, a bill was introduced in its leg islature imposing a uniform tax on all single men, sound in mind and body, above thirty-two years, who are not able to show that they have proposed marriage three times — and been rejected. The proceeds of the tax are to go toward establishing a home for worthy and indigent single women above the age of thirty-eight. A Missouri bill makes the tax progressive, in creasing by successive increments as the bachelor persists in his state of single blessedness.
CURRENT EVENTS. At sea level an object one hundred feet high is visible a little over thirteen miles. If five hundred feet high it is visible nearly thirty miles. The largest printing office in the world is in Washington, D. C.; it is for printing Government documents. It is not generally known to Parisians that there is a hospital for trees on the banks of the Seine near the Bois de Boulogne. It is there that all the trees uprooted from the Champs Elys^es and the boulevards are taken to recover from the deleterious effects of the soil of the city.
