The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 21, 1901, Page 11

THE SUNDAY CALL. , How Unele Sam’s Accounts fire‘ Kept in the Jreasury Department. NeT X i er and mense a Big figures are 4 keepers m day ¥ SAM will spend about $730,- 0 between July 1 and June 30 Al of that immense scounted for and ultimate de of it by one set of in number, in the t at Washington. By cle Sam’s daily cash kept straight, and every morn- is struck showing how much Sover: took in the day be- partme ve men Ut ng the total of the hand. Accompanying balance sheet is a statement n enother division showing the of the money on hand—gold, bank notes. It 1s an interesting cash is counting room of Uncle Sam, state of the finances is exhib- zen or 5o big ledgers and an im- book, in business contain the records. every day exactly the the Government is whether Uncle Sam's household exceed his income or mot. It of course, that these summary of the busi- a thousand and rer books are required for the de- | other departments. n here. The book- of $250,000 as uncon- erchant would enter a ton ety credit customer. The balances Wallls Myers of *“Gospel " He says Mr. Gren- riences ex- in the Peace, on 2, for and the fireman when the later, the water, One ev got #y hand.’ caught hol g0 crocodile e hand of God e a A Peace a way a he On the k or far as the while the “bllged” were off Mr, Grenfell's or three scheel took instruments, ing; while a third res. By throwing twe t steamer's side a swung eround; but, mmed” Letween two of rock 1 efforts. nce, which made by the sid ef Boats and then k tw wever a united heave nd after half an immediately in fell, which el entirely. - boat on & sand- Ny plugzed and the wa- holes were into neighboring mis- other missionary boat, be- submerged vessel the six-inch rope Eventually a a channel suffictently o float again. grocer the sale of a pound of down in pencil and the book- sp the gun- | 1en be shouted, | board, | and | out of | the | ved as to | 1 vietim a sad The mis- | the whole of | up to the | and remained | A tornedo | e steamer, the | Shovels | endeavor- | off-hand way, as if that were a small item. Absolute accuracy is required, of course, and if one of these employes should make an error in addition or sub- traction he would feel disgraced. Here is a sample of the daily balance sheet, which is printed every morning and laid open to public inspection. This one was for May 2: Receipts this day: Customs, $819,2224; internal revenue, $877,113 10; miscellaneous, $105,027 59; total receipts, $1,801,362 93. Fxpenditures: - Civil and miscellaneous, $795,000: war, $3%0.000; navy, $100,000; pen- sions, $500,000; total expenditures, $1,775,000; excess of receipts, $26,362. In other columns on the same sheet are the receipts and - expenditures for the menth and for the fiscal year up to date, as well as a comparative statement for the same period in the preceding year. On_ another page of the exhibit is a statement prepared by the Treasurer’s of- fice showing the cash in the treasury. The cash in the general fund was $239,- 856,708 59. Against this were liabilities such as outstanding drafts, disbursing officers’ balances, etc., amounting to $83,326,41501, leaving an available cash balance of $156,- 030,298 58. There at a glance is a statement of Un- cle Sam'’s daily business and running cash account. Fortunately, it is a pretty good statement and shows a prosperous condi- tion. Besides the available cash balance, what you might term the pin money of the Government, the statement also shows that the treasury contains a little matter of $150,000,000 in gold coin and bullion, a reserve fund, and a trifle of $771,592,989 in gold and silver, held for the redemption of the paper money current throughout the country, making every plece of green- back as good as gold. Your Uncle Sam- uel is not contemplating “going broke” Just yet. This sectlon of the Treasury Depart- ment, known as the warrant division, is a very important branch of the Govern- ment service. It is the brake on expendi- tures. Not a dollar of the: taxpayers' money can be spent until one of these twelve bookkeepers looks into his ledger to ascertain that the account has not been overdrawn. Then, and not until then, the chief of the division certifies the ex- istence of a balance to the credit of the particular account. When Congress makes an appropriation for the War Department, say of $100,000,- 000, a ledger account i3 opened with the department, and the account is credited with that sum. Congress glves to each of the bureaus a stipulated amount, and the accounts are so credited in the ledger. When the Secretary of War de- sires to draw money to.pay the officers and men, he sends to the Treasury a requisition for $100,000, for instance, on account of the pay and allowance of the army. The bookkeeper looks at the requi- sition, which is in the form of a check, and turns to his ledger account to sece if there 1s $100,000 left. If so, he charges the sum to the -account, and a warrant is signed on the Treasurer of the United States, who turns the money over to the Secretary of War, who thereafter makes a proper accounting to the designated officials who admit and control the ex- penditures. It s therefore impossible for any department of the Government to get more mponey out of the Treasury than Congress has provided for it, as the watehful bookkeepers know to a penny how the account stands every hour. The work of the bookkeeper is not only important, but very arduous. The requisitions come piling in Sometimes at a tremendous rate, and each one has to be scanned, the ledger consulted and care- ful subtraction made. The hours of la- bor are not long, from 9 a. m. until 4 p. m., with half an hour for lunch. The two principal bookeepers receive $2100 a vear and ten get 32000 a year. They are all experienced, careful men. and most of them have served long in the department. The chief of the dlvision gets $3500 a vear, and is a busy man. He has to initial every requisition and warrant, for the Secretary of the Treasury would not sign a warrant without the red initials show- ing that the paper had passed the careful scrutiny of the veteran chief of the di- vision. The division performs other functions besides keeping Uncle Sam’s dally cash account. At the beginning of every Con- gress a statement is made showing the probable needs of the several departments for the coming vear, and indicating the estimated receipts of the Goverrment. This is sent to Congress, so that the law- makers can tell readily how much money they will probably have to appropritate, and how much is demanded for the next fiscal year. Coal Mings of England hat Are Unpder the Atlaptie Oegan. T takes a pretty active, healthy imag- ination to conjure up a more terrify- ing situation than to be in a coal mine at the bottom of the sea, with noth- ing between you and the vast body of water overhead but a thin shell of a ceil- ing. When the storm rages on the Waters above, the bowlders can be heard rolling over the floor of the sea as if it was the bowling alley of old King Neptune. Off the coasts of England and Wales are many of these submarine mines. The low- er workings of Botallack copper mine, off the promontory of that name, near Cape Cornwall, go down 1500 feet under the sur- face of the water, and they extend 2250 feet under the waters- of the Atlantic. Deep down there men toil and delve day and night, while the ships hurry to their R T o £ | | dier and cries “How! Kola!” ’ i L0 AILLANLT N AL it Zontoar et i\ S il . ¥ ‘ A Suidl BR RN IR RV SIS o e Er g AT ADAN AR AT \ o V™ L 20816 ¢ b X E LAY P RO PR TS 0P BN RN TRy ~ LRI b B 2 e who once saved his Nfe. He checks himself and the Indian’s life is spared. The incident is historically true. In “How! Kola!” Schreyvogel combines those elements of vigorous action with wonderful fidelity to detail, for which he is famous. RN e The Indians have been routed. VIRILE PICTURE OF FRONTIER LIFE, “HOW KOLA,” PAINTED BY CHARLES SCHREYVOGEL R ST\ SIS URID, S S R s e 4 reo s €y PRI 1< - ALY A R ¥ HARLES SCHREYVOGEL, whose “My Bunkie” was the sensation of the art world last year, has painted another remarkable picture of frontier life. “How! Kola!” which is on exhibition in the gallery of the Society of American Artists and which is reproduced here by special permission of the artist, will appeal to every one who knows the West. There has been a battle between a band of Indians and a squadron of cavalry. the pony of one of the Tndians has fallen. A trooper is riding down upon the fallen Indian and is about to kill the redskin, when the Indian recognizes the sol- In the vernacular of the Indian “How” has a variety of definitions. Much depends upon how it is uttered. “Stop” or “Don’t.” “Kola” means,friend. The trcoper, about to shoot the Indian, hears his cry of “How! Kola!” looks at the sprawling figure and recognizes a man In the flight It may mean “Hello,” “Oh,” No painter knows the horse, the red man, the soldier and the cowboy better. His frontier pictures have the atmosphere of the West with all its rugged picturesqueness and vivid contrasts. { i Bunkie.” “How! Kola!” together with “My Bunkie” and some other Schreyvogel canvases will be on exhibition in the Pan-American Arts building. the latest of Schreyvogel’s paintings will get from the judges of the Society of American Artists cannot, of course, be known until the awards are announced. vear “My Bunkie” won the Clark prize, the richest gift in the realm of American art. In the estimation of many good judges “How! Kola!” ranks higher than “My GR EEK FUNERAL STOMS. lity of getting an unex- w of the corpse, which is Cl U possib: funeral procession s foreigners ) & 014 men and in somber black. young white and half buried are thus borne for £h the streets of the n thelr home. You are one of the hotels and music of the dead march. jow and look Gown. rd you in the awfui of marble white- rm, the poor, helpless :pon the breast. times high dignitaries of the borne to the grave seated in ed upon an elevated platform. pley s too spectacular even , and it was finally e coffin lid, upholstered embrojdered silk and hung h, is carried at the head ons, which derive additional he numerous banners and e church held high in the s and mourners fol- 1 the men sitting at the sen doors rise, remove cross themselves as the w In the case of an officer | charger, caparisoned in him on this last exvedi- er's Magazine. L RS I ‘ THE SUN. ] HE sun is about 92,000,000 miles off. | The only way of measuring the dis- tance of a fixed star is by parallax, and scarcely more than half a dozen can be estimated that way. Suppose the sun is here, in space, on January 1. On July 1, it will be 184,000,000 miles over there. This is the base of measurement. The observer who wants to estimate tne distance of, say, the star A Centaurl, notes its position with regard to the next star. | In six months he notes it again, and if they | are separated by a different distance, a so-called parallax is established, and seme { calculation car be made of the distance | of the nearest one. In the most favorable cases_this parailax is extremely sligit. What 15 th2 sun made of? The lines of | the spectrum give an idea of its chemical | properties, but beyond that it is hypoth- | esis. His substance, as a whole, 1s of { much lighter material than the earth, but | yet there may be a hard and heavy fiory | pudding inside, for there is a light and | thick outer coating, named the photo- | sphere. Outside this, again, refining away to an unknown Jistance, is the chromo- | sphere, of hot air, so to speak. The spots | are rifts through the photosphere, coming and gcing, and some are so large that our | whole earth ‘could be shot right throush, | with a thousand miles to spare all around. When a total eclipse covers the sun, flames to the height of thousands of miles are secn out of the photosphere. | FRENCH DUELS AS FAKES. FRENCH journal has been ex- plaining how it is duels so rarely result in¥injuries to the combat- ants. It suggests that the bullets used are frequently composed of mercury and lead, which in welight and general appearance are almost perfect counter- feits excent for a slightly silver shade and greasy touch. Though heavy and solid looking the first blow of the ram- rod pulverizes them. All sorts of pre- cautions are taken against this kind of deception. Pistol duels are never fought with revolvers or weapons requiring car- tridges which do not present the neces- | sary quantities, but such duels are fought | with old-fashioned muzzle-loading pistols. iIndeed. it is not unusual for seconds to | agree on some celebrated “armurier” who shall furnish a sealed box of weapons | containing two pistols sealed and certi- fied, a number of similarly certified charges of powder and bullets, Trickery would therefore seem impossible. In spite, however, of all these precau- tions the benevolent fraud goes on. There are usually four seconds—two for each combatant. As it is easier for two men to come to an understanding than four, the pair that have agreed to prevent bloodshed manage to take charge of the loading while their confreres are listen- ing to the last nervous recommendations of the principals. HUMAN MIND AT ITS BEST. ESEARCH has proved that the hu- man mind is at its fullest power between the ages of 40 and 60. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, such as Byron, the young Napo- leon and Alexander, but taking it “full and by” the prime age of the mind of man is between 40 and 60. Bwift was 49 when he wrote*“Gulliver’s Travels,” and John Stuart Mill 56 when his essay on “Utili- tamManism” was published, although his “Liberty"” was written three years before, When ‘““Waverly” came out Sir Walter Scott was 44 years old, and nearly all of those tales which have made his lasting fame as a novelist were written after he was 46. Milton's genius made its loftiest flights when he was between 54 and 59. It was between those years that he wrote “Paradise Lost.” “The Task” and *‘John Gilpin” were written when Cowper was over 50, and Defoe was within two years of 60 when he wrote “Robinson Cr1 Of all the writings of Thomas Hood Song of the Shirt” and “The Bridge of Signs” are the best known and will live the longest. Hood wrote those two poems at the age of 46, Darwin wrote his “Origin of Species” when he was 50, and was 62 when he gave to the world his “Descent of Man.” Long- fellow wrote “Hlawatha' at 48, and Oliver ‘Wendell Holmes gave us “Songs in Many Keys"” when he had passed his fifty-fifth birthday. What reception Last ports over thelr heads. In falr weather the sailors may pity the miners under- neath them, but when it storms the fears and dangers are distributed about equally, for the water drips through the roof con- stantly and the big rocks toss and roll over the bed of waters, every sound being heard only too plainly by the men below. Many a time have the men and mine bosses retreated to the mouth of the pit as they heard the terrible grinding noises above them. This mine is closed now, but the coal mine at. Whitehaven is still work- ing. These submarine diggings extend for four miles under the Irish Sea and about 600 feet below the water level. Here hun- dreds of miners work day and night in the pitch black galleries, with a world of water over their heads. A neighboring town, Workington, once possessed a similar mine, but one evil day the sea broke through the roof, drowned thirty-six miners and destroyed the col- liery. Several years ago there was a ca- tastrophe like this in one'of the Lake Su- perior copper mines, which extended far under the water. The loss of life was vmuch heavier than in the English disas- ter. | The coast off Sunderland, England, is burrecwed with mines so thoroughly that real cities flourish far beneath the tum- bling waters. The principal seam of the Mcenkwearmouth colliery lles more than | 1700 feet under the German Ocean. To find that seam the owners of the mine expend- ed $500,000. This mine sprung a leak once and water poured in through the roof at the rate of 3000 gallons a minute and a big 200-horsepower pumping engine had to ba rigged up to clear out the galleries. Rap}dity ; With WHhich Rirds FI4. - E talk a great deal about the speed of our railway tralns and of our ocean greyhounds, but we are apt to overlook the | fact that there are some swift travelers where no rails have ever been laid and no steamship has steered her course. The carrier pigeon will fly at least thirty miles an hour, and some have been known to travel at the rate of sixty or even ninety miles an hour. Wild pigeons often fly hundteds of miles a day to feed, returning to thefr roosts at night, Audubon says they travel a mile a min- | ute. | - Water fowls, gulls, terns and petrels 1t- | &rally fly on the wings of the wind, if sur- | prised in a storm. They will rise high in ! the air, facing the gale, and making a little progress ¥rward as well as upward. | Then they will suddenly descend with | rapld Mlight toward one side of the storm- swept path, but falling off at the sams time in the direction of the blowing wind. Once more they will sweep around and face the storm, ascending heavenward and striking desperately out toward the direction of the storm, until finally they work themselves to one side of the storm center. During tremendous wind storms birds may sometimes be seen flying overhead at a great helght. When this is noted it may be taken for granted that the upper alr is comparatively qulet, and that the storm is confined chiefly to the lower re- glons. It is when the storm extends too high up that they drift away with the wind or fly away on the edge of the hurrl- cane, ! Migrating birds fly over distances so great that they m needs have great strength as well as great speed in flight. Bobolinks often rear their young on tha scores of Lake Winnipeg, and, like tius aristocrats, go to Cuba and Porto Rico to | spend the winter. To do this thelr flight must twice cover a distance of more than 2800 miles, or more than a fifth of the cir« | cumference of our earth, each vear. The little redstart travels 3000 miles twice a year, and the tiny humming bird | 2000. What wonderful mechanism it i3 that in a stomach no larger than a pea will manufacture its own fuel from two or three slim caterpillars, a fly, a moth or a spider, and use it with such economy as | to be able to propel itself through the air during the whole night at a rate of about fifty miles per hour, and at the same time keep its own temperature at about 104 degrees. Not all the swift travelers, however, make their journeys through the air. Some fish attain great speed in the water. The salmon and the swordfish are the fastest swimmers of all the forked-tail fishes. Only a fast running horse could outstrip a salmon, for it swims a mile in less than two minutes, and any horse could be left behind in a long race, for the fish can cover thirty miles an hour. TRAP LISTENERS 5 the telephone will bless the name of this Swede when they learn it. It is reported that an employe of the vented a device by, which. the telephone user can tell when a third party is listen- ing to his conversation, or to hers, which The visible part of the device Is a small metal box with a glass front. This is at- tached to the wall or desk near the tele- ton connects the “listener detector,” as it is called, with the telephone. The intru- sion of ‘“central” is indicated by the il- the glass of the “‘detecter,” which remains lighted up as long as ‘‘central” is on the wire. The connection of the operator at dicated by the {llumination of a white cross, so that the telephone patron can tell not only when and how long the ope- change “cuts in” to ask him whether he is through talking, or to listen to what he s saying. costs less than $2, and is being put in by a large number of business houses which use the telephone for transacting more EETHEARTS who make love over Stockholm Telephone Company has in- is more important. phone instrument. The pressing of a but- lumination of a red Maltese cross behind the second exchange with the wire is in- rator is on the wire but also which ex- The device, including {ts' installation, or less confidential business. BLUSHES WHEN RAIN FALLS, HE blushing tree is one of the strange things found in the swamps of Florida. It is found only in the thickets of these interminable marshes, whose luxuriant vegetation al- ways proves a revelation to explorers. It is called the blushing tree by those who know it, because it actually blushes or turns a pink color when rain falls upon it. It is a graceful tree, with broad, ba- nana-like leaves. Wide-spreading branches hang down slightly waving in the warm breeze, and it has emerald-hued foliage. It rises to a height of twenty feet, and its thick, substantial trupk {ndicates many years of existence. .“While watch- ing/the tree the rain began to fall in tor- rents,” says a returned swamp explorer, “after a custom it has in these parts. As the cool water drenched the tree I was amazed to note a changing of its color. Gradually but unmistakably the green hue was giving way to pink. I went up to its trunk under its spreading branches to ob- tain & closer look, and found it to be true, and the tree was blushing from the effect of the rain. In a few minutes the green had faded from sight, except In a few half-hidden spots where the rain had failed to penetrate.” After the shower had passed over the spectator watched with equal interest this remarkable tree again assume its famillar green color. g L RAILWAY CARS OF JAPAN. | N cold weather all Japanese travelers | H carry rugs, for the cars are heated | & merely by long steel cylinders filed with hot water and laid on the floor. Spreading his rug out on the seat—a Jap- | anese never sits on anything not perfect- ly clean—the passenger shakes off his | geta, or wooden clogs, and curls his feet | beneath him. The next move Is a smoke, in which | both men and women indulge. A :ny pipe is commonly used, which never contains more than a wisp of tobacco the size of a | pea, and affords not more than one or | two puffs to the smoker. The ashes ace then knocked out on the floor and an- | other wisp stuffed in and lighted from the smoldering ashes just refected. At every statlon there are venders of the little mandarin oranges. Every pas- senger buys a dozen or more, and eats them in a short time, throwing th® skins about the floor. Boys pass with tea in ‘(iny earthen pots, a cup placed over the | top. The price Is three sen (a cent. and a | half). The teapot is left in the car. | The Japanese throw all sorts of refuse | about and the car soon presents a verw | untidy appearance, or would do so if it were not for the porters, who come in at | odd stations and clean up.—New York | Sun.