Newspaper Page Text
Some Daring Pranks Played
Upon Royal Personages.
A FLOWER FOR THE KAISER.
Decorations That Made His Majesty
Explode With Wrath—A Medical Di¬
ploma Fer a Prince of Wales—The
Duke and the Stockbrokers.
Some years ago a paragraph appear¬
ed In a Berlin daily stating that Prince
Henry, who had just returned from
his visit to the United States, had
brought home as a present to his
brother a number of plants of a new
variety of crimson carnation. “As
every one knows,” the paragraph con¬
cluded, ‘‘the red carnation is his im¬
perial majesty’s favorite flower.”
On the day after the publication of
this news the kaiser was due at Aix
la-Chapelle. A member of the town
council suggested that every one in
the town wear a buttonhole of the
kaiser’s favorite flower.
The suggestion was at once acted
on. The frock coated members of the
deputation which waited next morning
on the platform each wore proudly a
buttonhole of the deepest crimson.
The poor fellows could not conceive
why the kaiser’s demeanor was so
freezing. He dismissed them with a
few words, got into his carriage and
drove off.
At the town hall was another deputa¬
tion, similarly decorated. Then his
majesty’s wrath exploded. “What is
the meaning of this insult?” he de¬
manded. Some one explained, and
then one of the kaiser’s attendants took
the mayor aside. “My dear sir,” he
said, “surely you know that the red
caruation is the emblem of the Social
Democrats aud of all flowers the one
which his majesty chiefly detests!”
Many years ago King Edward VII..
then Prince of Wales, was the sub¬
ject of a stupid hoax. He received a
letter informing him of his unanimous
election as honorary member of the
Princeton medical faculty and signed
by three students. With his invariable
courtesy the recipient requested his
private secretary to acknowledge it.
The reply said, “His royal highness
will remember with pride and satis¬
faction the mark of distinction re¬
ceived at the hands of the Princeton
medical faculty.”
As a matter of fact, there is not aud
never was such an organization.
As impudent a hoax as ever was
heard of was perpetrated in 1904 upon
a Belgian paper. A letter purporting
to be in the handwriting and above
the signature of Princess Louise of
Coburg was received by the editor,
who very foolishly published it with¬
out first assuring himself as to its gen¬
uineness.
This letter gave a long catalogue of
the wrongs of Princess Louise and of
her sisters and constituted a most
brutal attack upon her father, the king
of the Belgians.
The letter was at once copied by a
number of other papers, including
more than one in England. Naturally
it gave great pain to the princess her¬
self, and the only wonder is that a
prosecution for libel was not the im¬
mediate result.
Some years ago a young American
woman who was staying in Copen¬
hagen made a bet with a friend that
she would propose to the king of Den¬
mark.
On one of the king’s public reception
days the American lady found her way
to the royal residence.
“What can 1 do for you, madam?”
asked the king.
“Your majesty, I desired to ask you
If you would like to marry me?” w T as
the reply.
The king merely smiled.
“1 am afraid I am a little too old,”
he said, and at the same moment he
beckoned to one of the officials to con¬
duct the lady to the door. He had
put her down as a harmless lunatic.
A joke of rather a rough order was
played upon the first cousin of the em¬
peror of Austria, the Archduke Sal¬
vator, once when he was in Paris. He
was passing the bourse—the Parisian
equivalent of the Stock Exchange—
when his companion, a lanky young
French count, suggested that he
might look inside.
“If you walk straight in,” he said,
‘‘no one will notice you. They will
take you for a stockbroker.”
The duke took him at his word, but
of course be was no sooner inside
than he was recognized as a
His silk hat was instantly spirited
away, and he was at once surrounded
by a mob of dealers with notebooks
shouting fabulous offers to buy or sell
stock.
The duke had a desperate struggle
to reach the front lobby, and when at
iast he got there, hatless and
less, he found that some genial soul
had pinned a long price list to the
tails of his coat.
It is not likely that any
sovereign ever got a more
scare than did Ferdinand of Bulgaria
some five years ago. His private
retary, a young baron, was away in
Austria on a vacation when a letter
arrived for his royal master
ing that he did not propose to return
and that he would be glad for the sum
of £40,000: otherwise, he wrote,
would be compelled to sell a
of secret documents which he
taken away with him.
Instantly Prince Ferdinand
patched a couple of secret service
voys in chase of his missing
whom they ran to ground
shooting on his own estate.
investigation proved the missive to
nothing but a hoax.—London
WAYS OF TOE ORIENT,
Queer Ideas About Alleviating
Bodily Suffering.
MAGIC CURES OF THE TURKS.
The Treatment to Which Crippled
Children Are Subjected—Bunches of
Garlic and Strings of Blue Beads as
Panaceas Against All Kinds of Ills.
A stone strikes some part of the body
of an oriental aud inflicts a wound.
The train of ideas that this accident
would produce iu his mind would run
something like tIlls: The stone is the
cause of pain, the cause of the wound,
It is the principal origin of the trouble.
But the essence of every origin is bid¬
den, secret and therefore sacred. The
stone becomes au awe inspiring fetich.
The wound is neglected. The fetich
j has to be propitiated. This simple il
| lustration is borne out aud supported
i by everyday experience which med
i ical men encounter in the east.
Another instance may be derived
from among the lower classes of the
Greek population of Constantinople. A
child falls and cuts his head. The
first thought of the parent is to be sure
not to wash and to bind up the wound,
still less to call medical assistance,
however grave the cut may turn out
to be. This is always an afterthought,
which very often comes so late that
the help of a surgeon can prove of no
use.
The first thing the father or mother of
the injured child thinks of doing is to
pour over the shoulder upon the place
of the accident a libation of wine or
sugared water and to whisper in per¬
forming this some mysterious formula
supposed to possess supernatural effi¬
cacy against every form of evil.
The Moslems are addicted to the
queerest practices for purposes of heal¬
ing or alleviating bodily pain. A Turk,
for instance, in distress or suffering
from some disease, however severe,
knows of no better remedy than to fix
a piece of his dress, torn off with true
oriental equanimity, to an iron bar of
some saint’s tomb or to drink water
from a tumbler into which he has pre¬
viously put a sheet of paper with writ¬
ings from the Koran. Sometimes he
will take a jar, the interior of which
has been written all over with strange
formulae and signs. He will then fill
it with water, wait till these formulae
and signs have been thoroughly dis¬
solved and drink the singular solution
with an absolute faitb in its wonder
working efficacy.
Sheltered by the somber cypresses
of the great Mohammedan cemetery at
Scutari (the ancient Chrysopolis on the
Asiatic coast of the Bosporus) there
stands in picturesque solitude the tomb
of a horse. Every Friday afternoon
Turkish mothers carry to that tomb
their crippled children to be submitted
by a select “khodja” (priest) to an ex¬
traordinary course of treatment. These
children are dragged, with their dis¬
eased limbs dangling over the hillock,
from one end of the tomb to the other
aud then back again in the same fash¬
ion. The occult influence emanating
from this hillock is supposed to be au
all efficient panacea.
It is not diificult to trace in this case
the crude, imperfect association of
ideas. The horse has long been con¬
sidered an emblem of vigor, typifying,
as Euskin says, “the flow and foreq
of life.” Hence the belief of the ori¬
ental, inherited, no doubt, from the
Greeks, in the all conquering virtue
and influence of occult and mysterious
efHuvia which are supposed to emanate
constantly from a horse’s tomb.
The wearing of a necklace of blue
beads or of garlic as a potent means
of keening away disease or of warding
off the evil eye is quite a universal
matter of sincere belief in the whole
of Turkey. This superstition is shared,
as is well known, by the lower classes
of many a country in civilized eastern
Europe. There, however, it is not so
universal and flagrant as in the orient.
There is scarcely a house in the
Moslem, Greek and Armenian districts
of the population of Constantinople
which has not hanging above its en¬
trance door a collection of garlic and
scarcely a beast of toil which has not
attached to some part of it a string
of blue beads. Among the uneducated
it is impossible to find an individual
who does not pin absolute faith to the
all healing power of such charms,
especially of blue beads, which are
supposed to be au unfailing panacea
j against every possible ill.
Less general is the belief iu the east
in the baleful influence of the planets
Saturn and Mars upon the constitution
of the human body, upon its four car¬
] dinal humors—blood, phlegm, yellow
bile and black bile. These planets are
considered by some orientals, especial¬
ly in the far south, as the unmistak¬
able causes of all sorts of ailments.
Woe unto him who begins any work
when Saturn or Mars is iu the ascend¬
ant.—Cleveland Plain Dealer.
If Only.
Miss Enpec (engaged to Tommy)—
When you proposed to me you said
that if I would only say the right
word you would be the happiest man
la the world.
Tommy—Ah! If you bad only said it!
—Illustrated Bits.
Perilous.
“Were you ever in a railroad disas¬
ter?”
“Yes—I once kissed the wrong girl
while going through a tunnel.’’—Cleve¬
land Leader.
It’s the fellow who minds his p’s
and q’s that sleeps on flowery beds of
e’s.—Philadelphia Record.
THE COVINGTON NEWS
Evans Lunsford W. T. Milner.
LUNSFORD & MILNER
Wholesale and Retail
BUILDERS SUPPLIES
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of the state, and as we buy only from the best mills in the south, our gradings
are considerably ABOVE THE AVERAGE. Estimates and prices cheerfully
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i , BE WE WILL SURE SAVE TO YOU SEE MONEY, US BEFORE TIME ANI) YOU WORRY BUILD {
A BURGLAR’S ADVICE.
Where to Keep a Revolver at Night
and How to Use It.
1 fake my pen in hand (o write you
an answer to the mug that signs his
name "Victim” what says that a bolt
on your bedroom door nights will
make you safe from burglars coming
into the room and shooting your head
off aud to tell him the only way to
be safe from harm by burglars is to
lay still when they tells you to and
after they has gone to collect from the
burglary Insurance company.
Your man “Victim” is a dull guy if
he thinks a bolt will stop any one that
knows his trade, because we always
puts a gimlet hole through the panel
right back of the bolt and slides it
back quiet and easy just the same
way as we puts holes through the
panel back of dead latches on outside
doors, because there ain’t nothing will
stop a man that knows the trade only
a steel door with an iron crossbar back
of it and electric contacts all round.
What’s more is that any man that
sleeps with a pistol under his pillow
is a chump, because that's where we
always feels for it the first thing and
gets it before proceeding to the busi¬
ness of the evening, the right place to
keep a pistol being in the front hall
hanging on a nail where you ain’t
liable to do no damage to the bed¬
room walls and furniture with it. be¬
sides its being bad for nervous people
to wake up in the night and feel for
a pistol that ain’t there no more.
If a guy wants to take a pistol to bed j j
with him and thinks he’s got nerve
enough to use it the proper place for it j
is not under the pillow, because that’s
where we always look for it, but it’s j
at the foot of the bed. about where ]
you can stretch out with your toes so
that when you wake up and feel the
burglar’s hand searching under your i
pillow you can lay' still till he moves
over to the bureau, when you will
have plenty of time to get hold of your
gun with your toes and pull it up gen¬
tle and slow like you was still fast
asleep till you get your grip on it and
then if you are quick enough to make j
tlie burglar shoot in the smoke all
right, but If you ain’t got the nerve
for the job you’d better not have no
guns around, because lie will shoot
next.
Having been in the bolt slipping and
pistol collecting business for nine
years. I guess I know the game, and
if 1 knowed where your mug “Victim”
lives I would just come up some even¬
ing and pinch his gun for him to show
him his bolt is no good.—Sloppy Mike
in New York Sun.
Two Apologies For a Hat.
A Kansas City man who had lost
his hat at a public function in that
metropolis caused the following unique
advertisement to be published in the
local papers:
The undersigned will deem it a great
favor if the gentleman who inadvertently
took the undersigned's new silk hat on i
the occasion of the reception of the Lo¬
tos club, leaving an inferior headpiece in¬
stead, will have the goodness to return
said silk hat. Not only will the gentle¬
man receive the undersigned's warmest !
thanks for his kindness, but the apologies
of the undersigned—the apology for the
trouble tlie undersigned may have caused
him and “the apology for a hat” which he
has conferred upon the undersigned.
—St. Louis Republic. ]
Hypothetical Questions.
‘Wlmt will your motile* say to you
when you get home?” said one boy.
“She’ll start iu by asking me some
hypothetical questions,” answered pre¬
cocious Willie.
“What are they?”
“Questions that she thiilca she
knows the answers to before she starts
to talk.”—Washington Star.
Reproved.
The Young Doctor—Just think; six i
of my patients recovered this week.
| The Old Doctor—It’s your own fault, j
my boy. You spend too much time at
the club.—New York Life.
Enjoyment stops where Indolence be
gins.—rollock.
PROFITS CUT ALL
TO PIECES ON
PIANOS
.
Ten or Fifteen Different Makes.
$10 Profit on Factory Prices.
See This Line Before You Make
Your Purchase.
It Means Money To you.
C. A. HARWELL,
Leader In
Furniture and Undertaking
Covington, Ga.
♦<
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FOR SALE—Fine Homer Pigeons.
$1.00 per pair J. M. Aakon. if.
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i Trusses and adjust sieentifieallv j
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♦ July 6, 1909. |
♦ i Aiken, Ga.,
DR. J. A. WRIGHT, ♦
i ♦ Covington, Ga. I
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♦ Dear Doctor:— ♦
! My truss is all O. K. aud I telling the good news to I
am ^
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$4
