Evening Star Newspaper, April 28, 1894, Page 17

THE EVENING STAR. PUBLISHED DAILY EXCEPT SUNDAY. AT THE STAR BUILDINGS, 1101 Pennsylvania Avenue, Cor. 11th Street, by The Evening Star Newspaper Cor A 8. H. KAUFFMANN,Prest, New York Office, 88 Pottar Building, poten Sn tenths ‘The Evening Star is served to subscribers in the @ity by carriers, on their own account, at 10 cents Bet week, of 44c. per month. Copies at the counter cents each. By mail—anywhere in the United States or postage prepald—GO cents per Saturday Quint.ple Sheet Star, $1.00 per year: With foreign postage added, $3.00. —— tered at the Post Office at Washington, D. C., &s_second-class maf! ‘natter.) = £7 All mail subscriptions must be paid in advance. Rates of advertising made known on application MODERN SHANGHAI How Foreigners Live and Sport in the Paris of the Pacific, A FOREIGN CITY IN THE HEART OF ASIA A Visit to a Big Chinese Daily and a Talk With Its Manager. THE CHINESE CONVEYANCES Special Correspondence of The Evening Star. Copyrighted, 1894, by Frank G. Carpenter.) X SHANGHAI, March 28, 1894. T Is NOW A WEEK since I steamed through the mouth of the great Yang-tse- Kiang river into the wide waters of the Whampoa, on the French mail from Japan, and was an- chored under the shadow of the im- mense fortifications which the Chinese have built at the AYoosung bar to guard this entrance to their mighty empire. Standing on the ship I could see the guns frowning down upon us from the ramparts, and could almost hear the queer cries of the officers as they drilled their cotton-gowned, yellow-faced, almond-eyed troops. We lay for sometime Tight opposite the entrance to the fort, a Chinese structure of gold carving, looking ™mueh like the gate to a temple, and our vessel was surrounded by the big gunboats ef China's modern navy. It is twelve miles Gates to Woosumg Fort. trom Woosung up the Whampoa river to Shanghal, but the water is too shallow for the largest ocean steamers, and we made te journey in a steam launch. Phe coun- try te Cead flat. It is made up of the rich sediment which is carried down by the Yang-tse-Kiang river from the uplands of China. Standing on the deck of the ship you look for miles over gray mud plains, relieved here and there by what, in the distance, appear for all the world like cocks of hay, but which are the graves of Chinamen. On some of these graves I could see great black coffins resting, and I am told that the Chinese often leave their dead for years outside the ground, and that few burials are made when the ground is frozen. Here and there over the land- scape were thatched huts surrounded by trees, and im the creeks, which cut the plain lke the canals of Holland, the masts of the ships and boats could be everywhere Yeen. All along the river were platforms ef bamboo, with little sheds at the back of them and nets hung out from their fronts Into tke water for the catching of fish. We Pasieé Sundreds of craft of all kinds, from oz great Chinese war junks, with cannon extencing over their sides, and with great eails ribbed with bamboo, looking for all the world like the wings of gigantic bats, gnd the whole river was filled with other tat-ltke craft, carrying all sorts of cargo to and from Shanghai. As for our boat, it wes fille? with foreign and Chinese pas- sengt The only three Americans were Mr. and Mrs. Curwin Stoddart of Philadel- phia avd myself. My photographer took a Stap-shot at us, as we stood on deck, with Ab Shing, the rich Chinese tailor of Yoko- hama, w was on his way with his wife and baby to visit his papa in China. On the French Mail. Nearing Shanghai is like sailing into one of the great harbors of the Mediterranean. You see a foreign city lining the banks of the river and the smoke stacks of a dozen great factories send out their black clouds into the blue sky. There are several miles of these factories, and one I noted which covered many acres was in ruins from a recent fire. ‘It was a big gray brick of many stories, which the Chinese had built for the manufacture of cotton and in which they have for some years employed hun- dreds of hands and had the finest of mod- ern machinery. Until within a few months they have been paying for insurance to the foreign companies about $1,500 a year in gold. The fall in the value of silver to about 50 cents on the dollar made them grumble at this and when their policy lapsed last fall they economized by not renewing it. The result was that the fire cost them a million and a half of doliars, and as Li Hung Chang and others of the officials were largely interested in the stock the people will probably be squeezed to make up their loss. Going on up the river through great house like barges known as opium boats past a mile or so of massive wharves backed by iron-roofed warehouses, almost touching our side- wheeler gunboat the Monocacy, we landed at the French wharf and a moment later were in the greatest foreign settlement of China, the Paris of the east, the city of Shanghal. The Paris of the Orien ‘There is no town on the globe like Shang- hai. It is a city of the rich, who out here cn the shores of Asia,within a stone’s throw of the poorest people of the world, live more Iexurious lives than do the wealthy people of the United States or England. I speak of the Shanghai of the European and the American. The Chinese who are mixed up in it are as poor or as rich as they are in other parts of the empire. The foreigners have the right to the land in what is known as the concessions. These belong to Eng- lard, Fra’ nd the United States, and the government is made up of a council elected by them, so that there is In reality here a ublic, which makes its own laws, as its own police force and manages its own business independent of the celestials. ‘The land nominally belongs to the emperor, but it is the property of the foreigners by their paying a certain ground rent, which has been fixed by treaty. This amounts to about five gold dollars: per acre a year. When it was bought it cost something like two hundred dollars per acre, but much of it has been sold for from sixty to one hun- dred thousand dollars per acre, and thus made the fortunes of the original holders. Upon it all sorts of improvements have e up, and along the river there are now #6 fine houses as you will find anywhere in t<e world. Business blocks of immense size Te just back of a beautiful park between the river and the street, and a big city has atown up on the ground owned by the for- e\guers, There are only about three thou- par Che F) ening Star. Popes yah WASHINGTON, D. C., SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 1894-TWENTY PAGES. TO ADVERTISERS. ‘Advertisers are urgently re quested to hand in advertisements the day prior to publication, in ©rder that insertion may be as- sured. Want advertisements will be received up to noon of the day @f publication, precedence being Given to those first received. sand foreigners, but the foreign settlement contains more than two hundred thousand people, the remainder of whom are natives, who like to do business and live under for- eign protection. In addition to this, there is within a short distance the native city of Shanghai of one hundred and twenty-five thousand. This is surrounded by walls, and it is as dirty and as nasty as are the Chi- nese cities of the interior, where a foreigner has never been seen. Foreign Shanghal is a city of electric lights, of newspapers and of libraries. The subscription library here con- tains twelve thousand volumes, and the li- brary hewel Shanghai Club has more than five thor The Shanghai 400. ‘The Shanghai Club has a finer building than any club house in Washington. It cost $120,000 to build and ruined three con- tractors. At noon and in the evening you will meet in it as cosmopolitan a crowd as you will find in New York or Paris and its lobby buzzes with a noise which makes you think of the big hotels of Chicago when a national convention is in progress. The A Passenger Wheelbarrow. foreign settlement is, in fact, a city of clubs, and there are a racing club, cricket, rifle and yacht clubs and about a dozen dif- ferent Masonic associations. There is a brass band that gives concerts three times a week during the summer and there are concerts and dances almost every night in the winter. Washington or New York has hardly as many entertainments as Shang- hai, and the people here chase the Goddess of Pleasure much as they do in Paris. The city has its swell four hundred and the turnouts of the rich are driven by China- men in livery with almond-eyed,long-gowned tigers on the footboards. The horses are generally little Chinese ponies, not much bigger than Newfoundland dogs, but their drivers race them like mad, and with gay ess the miniature baby coupes, landaus and drags are quite impressive. The con- veyance of the ordinary citizen is the Jap- anese jinriksha, pulled by ragged, bare- headed coolies, and the Chinese, who wish to ride still cheaper, go about on wheel- barrows which are a sort of a cross be- tween an American bicycle and an_ Irish jaunting car. They are made of wood with a wheel of about the size of the front wheel of a wagon coming up through the center of the bed of the barrow, and a framework extending out in front of and behind this covering the wheel and leaving seats on both sides. The passenger puts one foot upon the seat and hangs the other in a stirrup made of rope of the size of a clothes lne tied to the front of the seat and holds on for dear life to the frame while a coolie w along from the rear. If there is a second ger he takes the passen; other side of the barrow and holds on in the same way. Many of these vehicles car- ry freight and passengers at the same time. I saw one this morning which was loaded on one side with money in the shape of about a bushel of strings of copper cash, By a Chinese Artist. while an almond-eyed maiden tried to pull down the other side of the machine with her weight. She wore a silk coat and wide silk pantalets which reached to her feet, but where she put her foot into the stirrup I could note her little blue shoe with its pointed gold toe. It looked more like a min- ijature club foot than the real variety. Her leg, which was wrapped with cloth, was as thin as a broom handle and showed no signs above the ankle of the curve of the calf. She wore a silk cap, out of which her oily black hair peeped at the back, and from her ears hung triangular pendants of green jade. On other barrows I saw Chi- nese men riding in pairs, and I met still larger barrows used for the carrying of freight. The passenger wheelbarrows alone in Sharghai number about three thousand, and there are mere than three thousand jinrikshas. The prices of both are very low. You can ride to any point in the city on a jinriksha for five cents, and the wheel- barrow hackmen get, I am told, about a cent a mile. Chinese Newspapers. I paid a visit yesterday to the biggest Chinese newspaper in the empire to make inquiries as to the employment of a Chinese artist to do some native illustrations for me, and had a most interesting talk with the marager. The paper is called the Shun Pao, and it is the best-paying and most widely circulated of the three native news- paper dailies of Shanghai. It is an eight- page sheet of about the size and shape of Frank Leslie’s newspaper or Harper's r printed on the thinnest of rice paper. It is so light that it does not weigh mcre than a,man’s handkerchief, and so thin that the paper can be printed on one side only. The paper goes to press in big sheets, which are so folded that the blank side is turned inward when taken in hand by the subscriber, and so that there is neither cutting nor pasting. Owing to the thinness of the paper, it has a greasy yellow appearance, and it printed so closely with Chinese type that not an. inch of space seems to be wasted. The headline or title of the paper consists of two Chinese characters, taking up a space not wider than one of the columns of our newspapers, and not more than an irch in length. It is @ one-cent sheet, its price being ten cash, but, as China is on a silver basis, this should, in our money, now be divided by two, and its price would then be only half a cent. A Strange Journal But let me give you my talk with the managers. I went to the office without my interpreter, and my jinriksha man, after driving me through a series of narrow Chinese streets, in which we had a number of marrow escapes from pony cabs and freight wheelbarrows, landed me at a ragged two-story building, with a side en- trance. Over this were large tea-box char- acters, meaning the name of the paper. I went in and made my way to the second story, where I luckily stumbled into the room of the managing editor. I addressed him in good plain United States, and found that he spoke English as well as I did. I introduced myself, and showed him some letters which I carry from the State De- partment and from high officials at Wash- ington. He read them and looked at the seals, and then bowed low again and again, and shook his own hands at me in Chinese fashion, and asked me to be seated. At my request he took up a copy of his news- paper and explained it to me, giving me a num! of facts about newspaper work among the celestials. “We have,” said he, “the largest newspaper in China, and our daily circulation is about twelve thousand. There are two other native newspapers published in this city, but neither of them makes as much money or does as well as we do. We are the oldest, and we have been in existence now twenty-two years. We have a good advertising patronage, and the Chinese believe in newspaper advertis- ing. Take a look at the paper and you will see that it is prosperous from an advertis- ing standpoint.” and sald: “This first page is all editorial. ! We don’t let any of our advertisers use it. If we let one they would all want it, and so we use it only for ourselves when we have announcements and for editorials and news. The second page and part of the third page is news and the ads. do not com- mence until the latter part of the paper. We often have to issue supplements to get in all our advertising, but our Chinese cus- tomers object if we do not put news and reading matter in the supplement as well. You note the lines run up and down the page instead of across it and the beginning is at the right of the page instead of the left, as with you. Our lines are about fif- teen inches long and we count by the word; not by the line. Each Chinese character represents a word, and our rates are 5 cents for each ten characters for the first inser- tion, 8 cents when the advertisement ruas for @ week and 2% cents a day per each ten words for all time after that.” “Are there many papers in China and do you find them in the interior?” I asked. “No,” lied the Chinese editor. “We circulate all over China, but you do not find papers published in the native cities. The governors would not permit them, as the editors might say things they would not like, and many of them would not want their do- ings criticised or reported. The Chinese are very economical. Money is worth a -great deal here. We charge, for instance, 10 cents cash for this paper and we have in reality a circulation of at least 50,000, though we print only 12,000 papers.’ “How is that?” said I. “The paper is resold and rented by the subscribers and others, so that at least that many heads of families get hold of it. We pay our newsboys two cash a copy for sell- ing, or, rather, we sell them the papers, so that we get eight cash out of the ten. They receive in your money just about one-tenth of a cent for selling and delivering the pa- per. Well! they cheat the regular customers often by renting the paper for six or seven cash to outsiders till 11 or 12 o'clock, when they will come around and get it and deliver it. We can’t prevent this here. Then dif- ferent shops subscribe for the Shun Pao and their customers come in regularly every morning and read it. Families pass it from A Chinese Newsboy. one to the other, subscribing together for it, and there are men who make a business of going about day after day and buying up old and clean newspapers of the subscribers to carry them out in the country districts to sell. So you see every newspaper reaches at least a half dozen persons or families be- fore it is burned.” All of the unsold copies of the Shun Pao are burned by the office. The Chinese »ev- erence literature so that they think it a sin to use as wrapping paper or in any common way anything written or printed in Chinese, and along the streets of the Chinese cities, fastened to the walls of the houses, you find little boxes filled with written scraps, which the passersby pick up whenever they chance to fall upon the street, to prevent the char- acters from being defiled. In Chinese houses, instead of pictures, you find often long I looked at it, but for the life of me I could not tell the “ads.” from the editorials, and I said so. The editor took it from me scrolls containing a sentence of classic Chinese beautifully written, and the literati often write to each other in poetry. I saw such scrolls in the little room of the dramatic critic of the Shun Pao, as I walked through the offices with the man- r and was introduced to the editor: The city editor was a fat Chinese gentl man in tortoise shell spectacles, the glass of which were as big as a trade dollar, who wore a blue silk gown and a black cap with red button on it. He was surrounded by his long-gowned reporters, to whom hegwas giving the assignments of the day, and he told me that he would be on duty till 3 o'clock in the morning, when the paper would go to press. I next visited the com- pag, Bags and took a lock at the print- ers. ere were, perhaps, a fozen at work, and I was told that their wages were from a dollar and a half to three dollars a week in silver, equal to seventy-five cents and a The Editor and Staff. dollar “and a half in our currency. The editors get from thirty to forty dollars a month, and reporters from eight to ten dol- lars a month in silver, according to their efficiency. The printers do night and day work for seven days in the week and 365 days in the year at these wages, and it takes no slight learning to be a Chinese printer. There are in the Chinese language 13,000 different characters, and each of the eases I saw in this composing room, the editor told me, contained about 10,000 di ferent characters. Think of that, ye printers of America, and thank God you were born in a land where the alphabet contains only twenty-six letters, and where there is not a different sign for every word in the lan- guage. In a Chinese printing office the cases are ten times as big as ours, and (From an illustrated paper.) each printer stands surrounded by three walls of type, running from his feet to the top of his head and sloping out from him on all sides. After a look at the business office of the newspaper, I was shown the only illustrated paper in China, which is also issued from this establishment. It is published every ten days. It is about as big as an old-fash- foned almanac, and it always appears in red or green covers. It publishes many descrip- tions of life in America, and its pictures of foreigners and their ways are laughable in the extreme. There is no prospective shown in the drawings, and the Chinese stories are full of blood and thunder, of sentiment and humor. Here the Chinese Romeo woos his almond-eyed Juliet, and there the tragedies of love, abduction, of crime and superstition are depicted by the Gillams and Reming- tons of this celestial land. nyt A, Caspentss mK AD, Cafents —_—— PCE Se eke “How many foreign languages can your wife speak?” “Three—French, German and the one she talks to the baby.”—Demorest’s Magazine. IN THE GREAT DISMAL A Lamptonesque Description of a Swamp Exploration. terminable tangle of trees and vines, be- fore he is half merged in the mighty morass, he begirs to feel the impress of its mys- tery and to struggle beneath the burden of its silence, its solemnity and its shadows. Moved by such thoughts as these, I turned to my gondolier: “Who cut this canal?” said I. “George Washington,” said he. eodat he do it with his little hatchet?” id I. “I reckon not, boss; I ik a he done it wid a ax,” said d I resumed my THE TRIP BY DIP C Hl Previour ine'or mouse, How the Geographic Society Made Merry in the Morass. TOM MOORE SURPASSED Written —xclusively for The Evening Star. F THERE BE A word in the English language which, more than any other, car- ries its lugubrious- ness with it in its sound, that word is “dismal”; then, when one combines with it the word “swamp,” which, also, is not a morass of merriment, there is a resultant combination which finds fitting material- ization in the Dismal Swamp—the Great Dismal Swamp, as the more intense geographers have called it. As the man remarked after he had watch- ed a hog for awhile: “Well, they gave him @ name that suited him.” Long ago I made up my mind that some fine day I would go to the Dismal Swamp and see what it is like. The fine day was long in coring, but it came at last, and two weeks ago, when I was informed that the National Geographic Society army was going to march to the swamp, and that I could go along if I had the collateral, I enlisted on the spot. Friday evening of last week was the time set, and prcmptly at the hour the army, to the number of eighty, more or less, under. the command of General Gilbert, Admiral Day and Major General Babb of the geo- logical survey, set out on its march, going down the Potomac to Norfolk, but not on foot, nor yet swimming. At Norfolk the Virginia Beach contingent split off and went to that resort, while we of the swamp- ers’ brigade, numbering thirty, hied our- selves on over to Suffolk by train, a distance of twenty-three miles, What became of the V. B. contingent I don’t know, except that it was on hand all On Jericho Ditch. right Sunday evening in Norfolk, ready to take the boat for Washington, D. C. Jericho Ditch and Her Steamer. A mile and a half this side of Suffolk there is a ditch passing under the railroad track, and this is Jericho ditch, or canal, as it is called, until you see it once, or if you have a grudge against the canal family and want to call names. Here everybody got out by direction of Admiral Day, who had charge of the contingent, assisted by Brother Babb, the incarnation of general usefulness, and all except nine men went aboard of a knitting needle in the ditch, with a wheel at one end and a boiler in the middle, This craft, by name the Jennie Wilson of Lake Drummond—tlet us all hope Jennie never was as long and thin her namesake—is a peculiarity of swamp navi- gation, and if she were of any other shape she would have to get out of the ditch and walk, for it is only about eight to ten feet wide and two to four deep. In order to carry anything, then, the boat must be as near as possible the definition of a line— that is, length, without breadth or thick- ness—and that is the Jennie Wilson. Think, if you please, of a boat sixty feet long and five and a half wide, with a depth of hold that almost sticks up out of the water, and does when the boat hits a stump or jabs her nose into the bank, which she has been known to do when the steersman, who stands out on the bow with a pole for a rud- der, forgets what he is there for and uses his rudder to kill snakes with, as they gam- bol along the sedgy shore, or words to that effect. By Jericho way it ts called ten miles to Lake Drummond, the piece de resistance of the swamp, and it takes the boat four hours to make the trip, which would indicate that the boat lacks speed or that the estimate of distance lacks accuracy, either of which doesn’t prevent the passenger from having “that tired feeling” in quantities to give away by the time the journey is completed, so I am informed by those who went in by the boat. As for myself, I went with our party by express (wagon) six or seven miles to the Washington ditch, and was canoed to the lake—five miles, alleged. Going over there in that wagon, with one horse to pull six men, we passed through the suburbs of Suffolk, which I was assured several times by our driver had a population of fifteen people. Later I asked Mr. Hosier, a gentleman who is a boomer and has town lots to sell, if the driver's figures weren't a little shy, and when I told him what they were I feared for a time that he would do serious bodily harm to the driver, an in- offensive colored man, who didn’t know a town lot from a truck patch—as, indeed, a good many people wouldn't if they didn’t have a handsome map in colors. P. S.—That driver had better hide in the swamr until he can secure some modified statistics of population. About the only object of interest between Suffolk and the Washington ditch, beside truck farms and buxom belles on vine-clad porches, is what is called Soldiers’ Hope, an ancient house, with an avenue of trees lead- ing up to it from the road. The house is gone now, and most of the trees and all of the avenue, but once it was famous. “What soldiers’ hope?” I inquired of that driver. “ "Deed, I doan’ know, bos: “What sort of hope was it?” I continued; “hope that when they got there they could take to the swamp and escape from their enemies?” “Dat’s it, boss.” “Johnnies or Yanks?” “Johnnies, I reckon, boss, caze de Yanks got in on um.” I made a note of this, and began exploiting my superior knowledge at the first oppor- tunity, only to be shocked by the informa- tion that the Soldiers’ Hope romance be- longed to the pre-revolutionary period and had something to do with our forefathers. I really don’t believe there was ever any- thing there, and I have lost confidence in that driver. In the Swamp. The head of navigation on the Washing- ton ditch is five miles from the lake, and here we took small boats, each with a colored gondolier, two passengers to the boat. Here begins the swamp, and here be- fore one has gone a hundred yards into the shadowy wilderness of cypress and ctinging creepers, before he has fairly be- gun his juniper journey, before he has more than crossed the threshold of the in- It is true, however, that Mr. Washington did cut this canal or ditch. He owned a farm at the exterior terminus of it, also a saw mill and other articles of vertu and bric-a-brac and the ditch was needed to get in and out of the swamp on. George was a straight man, as we all are pleased to be- leve in these later days, and he laid off this ditch by the lines of his character, with the result that there isn’t a crook in its entire course. Just what kind of a look- ing canal a leading politician of today would construct, following the same rule, it wouid be—however, that is another story, as Ruddy Kip. would say. After three hours of paddling—the ditch is too narrow for oars—we came to the lake and the Hotel Dismal on its margin. I say “margin” advisedly, for this lake has no shores. There is no earth to make shores of, and the trees and vines and reeds come down to the water’s edge, ney, even into the water, and they are encroach- ing upon the boundaries of the luke year by year, so that some day it will all be swamp. As the lake is only seventeen feet deep at the deepest and some of the trees are nearly a hundred feet high, they could now wade out into it without getting over their heads. But they don't. Hotel Dismal. The white-washed plank hotel is of the Venetian style of architecture; that is, it has water for a fountain, and soft water at that. It is impossible to go twenty-five feet away from it in any direction, except by boat, and boat exercise after the sec- ond day, I imagine, has a tendency to give one the bow knots in the limbs, to say nothing of how painfully indurated the seat in a boat becomes after one has ap- plied his person to it for several hours Eastern Shore of Lake Drummond. consecutively. There are accommodations for thirty-two guests, eight in a room, two to a bunk and one sheet to a bed. As there are objections to one-man-power govern- ment, so there are to one-sheet-power beds, but it isn’t so bad, when one learns by trying it, that there are not some other things there which are found in more civ- ilized hotel beds. Evidently the cimex lec- tularius does not find the climate of the swamp congenial. The dining room is the only other in the house, except the kitchen, and it is the reception hall also when the eating func- tion is not in progress. What we ate in that hall was corn bread, fish, bacon, eggs and rolls, with good coffee. Not an elabo- rate menu, of course, but one to put fat on your ribs after you got used to it. Did you ever hear the story of the horse and the shavings? Our contingent beat the steamboat crowd to the hotel by an hour, and when the late arrivals got in the sports forthwith made Tor the boats to try their luck with the “tinny tribes,” the “speckled beauties” and other denizens of the deep. Admiral Day, with @ well-known newspaper man and a well-known physician, went forth with the others, and, having got not so much as a nibble, a drenching shower rose over the jake and tumbled right down on the ad- miral and his party. he admiral and the well-known physician tried to paddle ashore, while the well-known newspaper man sat amidships with an umbrella over him, and that boat, under the skillful manipulations of those two sad sea turned around fourteen times, ran into the roots seven times and was ten minutes going twenty yards, and it raining harder every minute. Every rose has its thorn. Seven or eight ladies the courage to make the voyage into the swamp, but when they saw the accommodations. they hadn't the courage to stay; neither had all the men save nine, and at the last moment two young ladies braced up and let the boat go back without them, and they didn’t regret it, nor will they ever, for a night in the Great Dismal Swamp is an experience one never forgets, Mysteries of the Night. It is at night that the silence and the solemnity, the mystery and the majesty of the Great Dismal come with all their impressiveness and grandeur, and the human being does not live who can stand | by that shoreless sea and not be profoundly moved by the invisible and all-pervading spirit of his weird environments. After the moon had risen I went out into the dark waters of the lake, and rocking idly in the moonlight, sat and listened to the stillness. No light along the circling marge sent out its welcome beam to say that man was there; no sound came forth to herald living things, save now and then, at intervals, the solemn hooting of the owl, as if he tolled the knell of universal death; no voices of the night to speak us, sailing on that sound- less sea; wrapped in a shroud of silence,sky and sea and shore had sunk to sleep, and we who rocked upon those moonlit waves were atoms in the silent infinite, Which reads like an advertisement for the Dismal Swamp Town Lot Company, but it isn’t; and if you ever, gentle reader, sit out there on that lake in a boat at midnight you will know that it isn’t. Lake Drummond, Lake Drummond, as this central sheet of water is called, is almost circular, being five miles by six in extent, and its southern line is very nearly in North Carolina. Va- rious geologic myths prevail as to its origin, but the real fact is that its site was lower than the rest of the swamp, and the water of the surrounding territory, being unable to repeal a well-known law of physics, ran down that way, instead of taking to the hills or climbing a tree. I’m not much of a geologist, but I'll take issue with any of them on this point and prove my theory to be correct. Tom Moore, an Irish poet of some renown in his own country, visited the lake about ninety years ago, and wrote a poem on the only poetic legend that the swamp has ever been able to turn out. The legend is to the effect that a young man, whose sweetheart had died, went crazy and ran off into the swamp, where he thought she had gone to paddie a white canoe, though what the ca- noe had ever done to be thus punished does not appear. Tom’s poem began thus: “They made her a grave too cold and damp For a heart so warm and true; And she's gone to the lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where all night long by the firefly lamp She paddles her white canoe.” ‘There are six more stanzas, but they do not add any new particulars to the main facts, so I shall cmit them. Mr. Moore wrote very good poetry for those days, but he did not clutter it up with facts, and in this instance he got wolves and birch trees into the swamp, though the great Creator couldn't, or didn’t, do it when he put it there. There is a ‘small boat on the canal named “Tom Moore” in his honor. At least it is partially in his honor, the balance be- ing to enable the brilliant and witty tourist to remark that, however many boats may be taken away, there is always one Moore— and his merry ha, ha, may be heard echoing through the swamp till the next one comes. Called Fishing. There are fish to be caught, but they are cats and Frenchmen and jack-fish and perch and that kind. Sluggish and sleepy as the waters of the lake are, it is about as exciting to pull them out as it is to pull tacks out of a carpet. Still they are more edible than tacks, and if you don’t eat fish down there you will stand a pretty fair chance of becoming hollow in the course of a week or ten days. I caught four cats in about ten minutes and I felt as ashamed of it as if I had caught the measles, for the fish had never done anything to me, and I'd as soon eat a waterdog as a catfish. Still, some of the party fished for hours in the delusive hope of at least getting nib- = enough to lie about when they got ome. N. B. I have affidavits covering my catch. There is no steamer on the lake and all the navigation fs done in canoes and small boats—very dangerous media of transpor- tation when a sudden storm arises and Sweeps the bosom of the deep. A man was drowned there a year or so ago, but not one-thousandth as many lose their lives here as on the ocean, where the mwst im- proved facilities of navigation ey | which speaks well for the lake boats. Barring the novelty of our situation, we slept well that night and awoke next morn- ing feeling as frisky as colts, for there is a tonic in this air which is anything but malarial. Indeed, sickness is unknown in the swamp, and when the swampers want to die they have to get out of it. Uncle Ballard Copeland, the genius of the swamp, has been living there year around for many years, and he is growing younger, and they say he is becoming romantic and is con- templating matrimony. The Trip Ont. Our party followed the steamboat party of the day before at 9 o'clock on Sunday morning, four going by the Jericho ditch and the others by the Washington way, so as to see all there was to be seen. Ed was our gondolier via Jericho, and a willinger fellow to let his passengers assist in the ceremony of paddling you never saw. They say it is ten miles out that way, but I think I have some signs concealed about my person which would indicate that it is forty. Ed told us stories of the bears in the swamp, and the deer and the ‘coons and the wild cattle, about the only mam- malia the swamp possesses, though I believe there are some squirrels. Birds seem to stand it pretty well, and in the less thickly grown portions they make the swamp redo- lent of song. The wild cattle are sui generis, so I am told, and there are sup- posed to be 500 in the swamp. They orig- inated from domestic stock, but now there is no more domesticity about them than there is about a society woman. They and the bears have frequent fights, making a sort of a Wall street of the swamp, greatly to the credit of the swamp. I have my doubts as to the frequency of these fights, but it sounds well in print. There are snakes, though, galore, and we counted twenty-one on our way out, not as many by forty-four as the steamer party, up the day before, reported. However, we didn’t have to believe what they told us, any more we did the other legends of the swamp. They sell no liquor at the Hotel Dismal, and I have concluded they do not just to prevent the growth and development of these snake stories. The only person living in the swamp is Uncle Ballard Copeland, though along its edges, for it begins quick, are many small farmers and “swampers”—men who work inside, getting out timber. The soll is composed entirely of “roots and yarbs,” and in the entire circuit there is not dirt enough visible to breed a real estate boom. Somewhere, though, there is something to breed mosquitoes and green and yellow flies, which in the later summer drive out all comers. The mosquitoes are almost large enough to fry, and the green flies are so poisonous in their bite that it is alleged they get their color from arsenic, which, I presume, they use to improve their complexions. ‘The Pipe Stem Crop. ‘The timber of the swamp is cypress, Juniper, maple, ash, gum, pine, fishing poles and pipe stems. These latter occupy all the available space, and I have made a calcu- lation as to the quantity of pipe stems in that swamp. I counted six reeds to the square foot, with five joints of stem to the reed, each joint six inches long. There are square feet to the acre, or 4,390,000,000 feet in all; this multiplied by the number of feet of stem to the foot and divided by the num- ber of feet in a mile gives us in round num- the cigarette habit is carrying off every year many of our young men whom we can easily spare without serious detriment to the social fabric. poles in the swamp, I leave that to the fertile fancy of the men who handle the rod and know a whale from a sucker, yet never recognize anything but whales. Cypress Trees and Their Knees. The interesting tree of the swamp is the cypress; tall and graceful, and presenting that odd growth known ypress knees.” These grow up from the roots of the trees under the water, seldom attaining a height above three feet and looking like the stumps of amputated legs. Just what they are ists, but not knowing any more about bot- any than I do about geology, I venture the statement that they ought to be called cypress lungs, instead of knees, and then everybody would know the function they perform. Some other trees growing in the swamp, with their roots below the perma- nent water line, have something of the same way of getting air, and none do which grow above the water line. The juniper tree is becoming scarcer, but there is enough there yet to maintain the beautiful topaz tint of the water and impart to it qualities which have made it famous wherever ships have saile?, for they take it with them in prefer- ence to any other. How it will mingle in a toddy or julep only those know who have carried the other ingredients into the swamp with them, for no man of our party was wise in this respect. Somebody has tried it, though, for there is a little patch of mint growing in front of the hotel. P. S.—A hint to the wise, &c., &c., and— Why there should be such an absence of legends as attaches to the Dismal Swamp I fail to understand, unless those who lived about it when the legend flourished else- where were neither poetic nor leisurely. Of course, stories are told of the slaves who the swamp, fettered only by nature, but these are prosaic and true. What we yearn for is the romantic legend, such as Moore built his poem upon, and it looks as if th: woods should be full of them. Corduroy Prome den. there are such in the swamp, and they are unique. They are called “tramways,” ard are corduroy paths, five feet wide, with ‘wooden rails on them, for the transporta- tion of timber from the interior to the wa- ter. We went to one, a mile from the ho- tel, in a boat, and climbing over roofs and snags to make a landing, walked along it for two or three miles, and if there is a more novel and attractive promenade than that in this broad land of freedom I would | like to lease it for the purpose of exhibi- tion. There are through the swamp, and it would be a very easy and inexpensive work to extend them everywhere and make all points of the swamp accessible. We reached daylight at Jericho junction four hours after leaving the lake, and once more stretched our legs on terra firma with an infinite sense of relief, and yet with a feeling that we hadn’t had enough of the swamp. My advice to those visiting the Big Dis- mal is to go in by Jericho way and come out by the other ditch, as in that manner the interest of the trip increases, the Wash- | ington ditch being much more wild and beautiful. There are other ditches through the swamp, but they are not navigated as much as these two are. We dined at Suffolk, where we were taken by the inhabitants for a company of play actors, and at 3 o'clock skipped for Nor- folk, a city of which that same poet Moore, referred to elsewhere, said: “Norfolk, it must be owned, is an unfavorable specimen of America. Norfolk has made giant strides in the last ninety years, but she has not yet strode to that point where she fecls like erecting a monument to Mr. Moore; at least, if she has, we couldn't find it, and we didn’t dare ask anybody if there were such a thing in the town. Here we met the V. B. contingent, with those who had deserted us in the swamp, and we took the boat for home, with a unanimous feeling that the National Geo- graphic Society was a great institution, the excursion was a delightful success and the men in charge of it ought to have their wages raised without having to go on strike. In conclusion, let me say that for a trip 100,000 acres in the swamp, with 43,000 | bers 1,221,600 miles of pipe stems, and still | As to the length of fishing | there for is a mooted question with botan- | ran away in the old times to live or die in| Speaking of promenades, reminds me that | of two days, with a lifetime of interest 2: novelty in it, this to the Dismal pa ey aa 5 all en, and shou! en to be apprecia' W. J. LAMPTON, N. B. We had a poet with us, or a ess, I fancy, for I saw two young Wo! hovering over the whitewashed sides the hotel, and later I found this writing on the wall: A stretch of sky in gray and blue, A house by lonely Drummond's A maiden in a white canoe, One sheet upon a bed—no more! That somehow doesn’t seem to sound Tom Moore, unless it might be at his so it must have been the young women fore mentioned. W. J. a —— AN OREGON CLOUDBURST. For That Section, a Mere Inc! Hardly Worth Mentioning. From the Detroit Free Press. “When you talk of rain,” said Maj. ton, who built most of the snow sheds the Union Pacific road, and who runs a dozen saw mills on the Falls river Oregon—“when you talk of rain in the you simply never saw anything more 4 sprinkle. I've been out all day in you probably call a downpour, but if drop or two hedn’t hit my sore ear | Shouldn't have known it was raining.” “What's your idea of a rain storm, jor?” asked the interviewer as the two | Seated after the usual preliminary. “Why, water, of course!” he an “This drizzle can't be called real ter] | you know. It's just fog and smoke | evaporation from mud puddies which | up to come down again. Say, young | you ought to have been out to mill No. | one night last August and witnessed we call a genuine rain storm! It the biggest and fattest I ever saw, but | Would have given you a pretty fair idea what we can do out there on short notice. “Was it a cloudburst?” “Some folks call ‘em by that name, it’s defamation of character. A cloudb is simply an effort on the part of ti Weather to get about half @ million of rain water together in some locality and then knock in all the heads the barrels at once. The object is to cle the driftwood off the banks of streams discourage the umbrella trade. issue a cloudburst usually of three or four mountains to sliding hill to fill up some valley.” “About this particular rain storm, “Oh, yes! Well, about 8 o’dlock one barrels i | Moon the began Cascade range, to the west of us. e | snuggled together between two peaks, oi I judged there was water enough up t to wet down half the west. Falls river h just three feet of water in it that noon, and the ground for fif.een miles the west was valley-land on which a of cattle horses were grazing. I four buildings beside the saw mill, and the river and around the mill were saw logs. When I saw that it was going rain—that we were in for a genuin storn—I called all hands and we made a hill half a mile away.” “And the rain descended, aid it?” the interviewer as the major | have stopped short. “The rain! Oh! certainly. Yes, sir, @ rain descended in due time. When 1 thing was all ready the heads of the rels were busted in and down poured th water, A flood seven feet deep and t miles long came swishing across the and poured into Falls river. In about tl jerks of a deer’s tail the mill, fain and logs went on a voyage, and I haven’ seen a splinter of "em since. The flo brought along about 100 head of ho and cattle, and the bones of some of tl are in the tree tops around there today.” “And what did you do?” “Began getting out timber for a new mil next morning, of course. We don't let little cloud§urst knock the sand out of in Oregon, you know. Had a new humming away inside of thirty days. Don’ | write it up in a sensational way, or © | people will give me the laugh. It was sii ply one of our summer showers. A repor' from Portland happened to be down way, and how much space do you DP he gave &? Just five lines! A hund: housand tons of mountain slid into valley, a dozen people were drowned, an | everything on the river swept clear for | distance of thirty miles, but five lines co ered it all. Sorry that I can't make a b thing for you, but see me again—see next winter—and I'll tell you about son of our snowdrifts which have been bo a distance of 420 feet without striking bo tom.” ———_+2e——___ NO STRING TO IT. He Had Abundant Reason to Be picious, However. From the Detroit Free Press. There was a bright new 50-cent piece lj ing on the pavement, when a bow-back: man with a satchel came along from depot. He saw the coin while he was twenty feet away, and he made a sudde forward rush to get it. The movement almost instantly checked, however, he walked slowly forward and backed the curbstone and stood there and gi | at the coin with a foxy look on his coun’ nance. In about a minute a pedests came up, Saw the coin and for and put it in his pocket. Observing ti attitude of the old man at the same time |he turned and queried: | “It didn’t belong to you, aid itt Yall, J swan!” was the reply, Vhat’s the matter?” | “This is the queerest durned town I | struck in all my life. I was comin’ up th street last year about this time when Jj saw a 50-cent piece lyin’ jest about here. 1] | made a grab fur it, fell on my nose | rolled all over, and finally got up to fit that a boy had a string on the money had pulled it inté that doorway.” “And so you were shy of this one?” ‘aas, I was shy.” “And are half a dollar behind the game?”| | “Yaas, I'm half a dollar out. Say, | in a hurry?” ‘Wail, I'll hev to find somebody else, then.| I want to find a feller who'll sot down with] me fur about two hours and post me up. "m comin’ into Detroit once a week alll summer, and I want to find out what's got strings to it and what's lyin’ around loose| and kin be picked up. coe Woman's Greatest Enemy. When a woman ts troubled with heads aches the cause should be discovered, if possible, the overwork stopped, the mental] anxiety or distress removed, the errors in| | diet corrected, or the late hours exchanged for early ones, writes Elisabeth R. Scovil| in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Then a sim- ple laxative may be needed to prepare the| system to benefit by a tonic—cod liver cil, j iron, gentian, quassia, or whatever the doo-| tor recommends as best suited to the par- ticular case. The diet should be abundant | and nourishing, avoiding rich, made dishes, stry or anything Mable to disorder the digestion. Exercise in the open air, stopped | before there is any feeling of fatigue, is limportant. When the first unpleasant symptoms are felt lie down with the head | low, and take a teaspoonful of aromatic | spirits of ammonta in a little water. If | there is chilliness put a hot-water bag to the feet and cover warmly with a blanket. | If there is nervousness and depression take | half a teaspoonful of tincture of valerianate. of ammonia, instead of the aromatic spir- | its of ammonia, and repeat the dose in ff. teen minutes. Have the room darkened tack, and the pain and nausea begin to | manifest themselves, take a tablespoonful of strong tea or coffee, without milk if pos- sible, very hot, or very cold, and repeat every fifteen minutes for four doses. If the nausea continues the sufferer usually im- agines that it will be relieved by the act of vomiting, and is anxious to have an emetic, ‘This may be the case if the headache has come on immediately after eating, when the stomach contains a mass of undigested food, otherwise it is better to try to soothe the gastric disturbance and check the de- sire to vomit. Effervescing citrate of mag- nesia, iced vichy or soda water will often produce this result. When the pain is severe a piece of linen may be @ipped in alcohol and water, and a single fold bound on the forehead, wetting it as soon as it becomes dry. Sometimes a flannel wrung out of boiling water and ap- pelos ht ot en ee Ui