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Show FIGURES THAT DAZE-According to the return of our cotton goods and print manufactures, almost 1,000,000,000 yards were produced in this country in 1878, New England furnishing nearly two thirds of the amount. Geographically speaking, this production would be sufficient, if put into one piece, to encircle the earth at the equator nearly forty times. The cotton shuttle of to-day is thrown at the rate of three times a second, and, perforce the inventive genius of the country, the poorest woman who walks the street may appear in a dress of calico of recent and tasteful design, which shall not exceed fifty cents in the cost of all the material. Homer drew a picture of the once only method of spinning when he portrayed the virtuous Penelope spinning for Ulysses. This method is still practiced in the Orient. To spin ten skeins in twelve hours, or three miles and a fraction of thread, the spinner walks 28,000 feet, or about five miles. The girl who tends a spinning machine of the latest type, attending to 600, and sometimes 800 spindles, each of which spins 5,000 yards a day, produces a thread which would reach from Boston via Chicago to the Sierra Nevadas, and the girl does not walk at all. "OH, A PEASANT'S LIVE FOR ME."-Master Tommy. "Did you always have plain bread and cheese for your dinner Hodges?" Hodges "No, Master Tommy, I didn't allus ‘ave the cheese, but I'se in a good place, now, and gits a matter o' nine shillun a week, and you won't believe the lot o' fellers as comes a mouchin' about me now as wouldn't notice me when I was poor."-Fun. "A novel sort of "love spell" has recently been tried in a small district of Russia, and, if it did not succeed (and of this no account is given), it was not for want of energetic application. A peasant was perpetually quarrelling with his wife, because, as he declared, he "had ceased to love her." The village council took the matter into consideration, and adjudged the peasant to receive twenty blows with rods, "to compel him to love his wife again." One of our best known operators has a pretty daughter who is a bit of a hoyden, brokers and bondholders are notorious for talking shop, and our operator is no exception to the rule. Of course Miss Tomlin has imbibed the jargon of the street, and of course she knows how to use her tongue. The other night, at dinner, the young lady spilt a goblet of water all over herself. The head of the family framed a stern rebuke, promptly checked by the chit with this explanation: "Oh, let up, pa, I was merely watering your stock.-Boston Courier. |