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HOW NEW YORK SHOPS. § (ijtjjs $20,000,000 Pass For Over Holiday the Things. Great City’s Counters |||| - j»N 1 » m V, Some person with a love for largo figures has said that in Christmas week $20,000,000 is handed over counters of this city as tribute to Santa Claus, says a New York correspondent. That sum may sound suspiciously great, and the statistician might be charged with the evil of exaggeration, butwhen it is remembered that gifts for 3,000, 000 of people are purchased here $20,- 000,000 do not seem too large for the total. An average of a trifle over $6 per person is large, or small, accord¬ ing to the financial rank ol the reader, and in New York it is particularly dif¬ ficult to strike a fair average, because of the extremes of poverty and wealth. The Fifth avenue millionaire gives his wife a $30,000 diamond necklace, while the father of the east side brings joy to the heart of the child of the tenements with a gaudily painted ten- cent toy. One Christmas, a half a dozen years ago, William K. Vander¬ bilt gave his wife, now Mrs. Belmont, a pearl necklace that cost him $1,500,- 000 to gather the fifteen feet of stringed pearls together. That same Christmas more than one child found delight in i. \ jpj y. ; 4 * 'M m Piss • Y. s£ ’ // m £ *i Mm A ^V\ mil] j ! i WJ, / Y'Wf. / W */ (!\\ // if r* Y/// £ rvfi M & •V m rfcS i \i \ Ms, w. m f ‘j? I CY3 i m §t i Xz ?) ml t- M 3 w // s J mi. i, A/ 5*. y* I m d M r HOW NEW YOBK SPENDS ITS MILLIONS FOB HOLIDAY GIFTS. a nickel toy. Christmases back John D. Rockefeller sent a check for $100,- 000 to the Fifty-seventh holiday Street Baptist church as a offering, ancl the same day the organ grinder of Mul¬ berry Bend dropped a couple of cop¬ pers in the plate of the Italian church in Roosevelt street. So much for the extremes of Christ¬ mas giving in New York. Fully one-half of the Christmas shopping is done the day and the night before Christmas; notone half financi¬ ally, but numerically. T ie moderate¬ ly poor, tho poor and the very poor mus,t wait until the very last minute to get their small funds together for the great event. The money gift of the employer to the bread winner of the family is made the day before Christmas, and often times the extent of that gift determines the scope of the Christmas shopping for tho family. Again if Christmas comes near the end of the week, as it does this year, many will get their week’s pay on Thursday night. Another potent reason for delaying the shopping to the last minute is that things are cheaper on Christmas Evo than earlier in the week, Toys and games and clothing have suffered from the rough handling, there are rips and tears which, however, can be easily sewed up; paint has been scraped off, parts of games lost and numerous other mishaps have occurred, all of which induces the shop owner to make a material reducution in his prices. A,gain, he does not want to carry a single piece of his Christmas stock over for a year, as he loses the use of the monsy. So he is eager to mark things down to the real cost, or a trifle below, if needs be, to get rid of them. People who have to watch the pen¬ nies are quick to recognize these ad¬ vantages. So Christmas Eve is the great shopping time for the lower part of town and the East side. Vesey street is the Christmas Eve stamping ground of the old First and Fourth Warders. The people for tho most part of this district esteem themselves lucky if they can sjrend $2, and as this sum has to supply the Christmas din¬ ner, as well as to bring Santa Claus to an abnormally large family of children, sharp bargaining must be done. Push carts line the streets from Broadway to the North River, and al- most anything from heavy clothing, household furniture, kitchen utensils, to tiny gimcrack toys can be bought. Ten cents is the prevailing price for the average run of things, and at a squeeze this can be brought down to nine, or even eight cents. Grand street is the centre of the great East side. The Bowery boy buys the Bowery girl a ninety-nine- ceut diamond ring there, and she reciprocates by purchasing a seven- caret, seventy-nine-cent diamond stnd. Women with seven or eight children toddling along in open-mouthed won¬ der manage to get through the alarm¬ ing crush with their trancelike charges in some remarkable way. A man with a hobby horse on one shoulder, a ve¬ locipede in his hand, a Christmas tree under his arm, big dolls sticking out of every pocket, a dozen packages held in some miraculous manner in the other hand, stops and buys n five pound box of oondy for forty cents, stows it away somehow, and goes on as happy as themillionaireridingthrough the Park in his victoria. Tough girls not above sneaking a roll of ribbon under their wraps, were it not for the hordes of detectives which fill the stores of Grand street, buy to the limit of their purses, but buy sharply. “lam going to buy a bennie for Jimmie,” says one to her friend. “Say, mister,” to the floorwalker, “where do I buy der bennie?” “Hey?” “Per bennie? What floor is youse selling them on?” “The bennie?” “Yes, yer hungry-looking guy, der bennie. Don’t yer spose I’se got de price? I want to buy a bennie like dis.” Here she canght hold of a man wearing a blue overcoat and held the coat for the others inspection. “Oh, a coat—on the fifth floor, front.” “What d’ye ti’nk of dat? De guy didn’t know what a bennie was. He must be new on Grand street.” Then they take the elevator and she tells f.w ui ■A wmm ' 'v> m WA l I v, ffssrfei. wmwrn $ Mam vV>^ BT-SgH n m 'ej ■ ; A ffP If jy m Si?'* * OLDEST LIVING TWINS. the man to let her off “where dere soilin’ de bennies.” Fourteenth street and Sixth avenue is where the biggest part of the city, « goodly section of Brooklyn, a largs part of Jersey and a big portion of all the suburban towns within fifty mile* of New York do their shopping. Biggest Sweet Potato Grown. h-'* ilM V- 1 MA J i I i 1 A Kansas farmer, John Graham, of Abilene, has grown a sweet potato which he says is the largest in the world. It is twenty-five inches in cir¬ cumference and nine inches in length. It weighs nine and three-quarters pounds. Woildlng Threads. In certain parts of China the young women wear their hair in a long, single plait, with which is intertwined a strand of bright scarlet thread, which denotes them to be marriageable. WERE BORN IN 1815. Ladies Wlio Claim to Be the Oldest Liv¬ ing Twins in the Country. The claim of the Newell brothers, of Missouri, that they are the oldest pair of twins in tlie country, will not hold, according to a correspondent of the Chicago Times-Herald. Mrs. H. H. Johnson, recently of Kankakee, Ill., and now of Omaha, Neb., and Mrs. David Noggle, of Janesville, Wis., are one month older. These ladies are the twin children—Polly M. and Anna M.—of Benjamin and Eunice Mosher Lewis, and were born at Bristol, N. Y., May 29, 1815. They were the young¬ est of fifteen children. The twins went to Milan, Ohio, wLen about seventeen, married there, and in 1837 Mrs. Noggle came to Wisconsin to live the life of a pioneer. Mrs. Noggle is a woman of native ability and can tell many interesting tales of early life in Wisconsin. She is the mother of soven children, The sisters are both in full possession of their faculties and are as active as women of sixty- five. HOUSE REPUBLICANS VOTE EX¬ PENDITURE OF $141,208,880. DINGLEY DEFENDS THE TARIFF ACT. lie Declares In a Speech That Next Year Will Show a Surplus of Something Like *10,000,000. A Washington special says: The house at Friday’s session passed the appropriation bill without amendment and adjourned until Monday. The : m mdments offered by the democrats to correct alleged existing abuses were all ruled out on the point of order that they were new legisla¬ tion. As passed the bill carried $141,- 263,800. The debate covered a wide range. It touched not only the question of our pension policy, but that of civil service reform and the receipts and expenditures of the treasury under the Dingley law. On the latter question Mr. Dingley made an important state- ment, in which he expressed the opin¬ ion that the receipts would equal the expenditures before the close of the present fiscal year and predicted a surplus of $10,000,000 next year. At the opening of the session it -was agreed that when the house adjourned it be to meet on Monday. On motion of Mr. Foss, republican of Illinois, Saturday, December 18th, w r as set apart for paying tribute to the memory of the late E. D. Cooke, of Illinois. The house then resumed the con¬ sideration of the pension appropria¬ tion bill, which was debated Thurs¬ day. of Missis¬ Mr. Sullivan, democrat, sippi, in support of an argument against tho payment of pensions to those who were wealthy and did not need them, quoted at length from an article recently written by General II. Y. Boynton, whose testimony against abuses in the present system, be said, was entitled to respectful considera¬ tion by the other side. Messrs. Carmack, Gaines and Sims, democrats, of Tennessee, spoke briefly in favor of retrenchment in pension expenditures. Dingley contended that the Mr. maximum pension expenditure was reached in 1893, when the pension payments reached $198,000,000. In 1894 they fell to $141,000,000; 1895, $141,009,000; 1896, $139,000,000, and in 1897, $141,000,000. If tho expen¬ ditures for pensions during the next fiscal year should be $148,000,000, as had been estimated, the increase, Mr. Dingley said, would not be due to new legislation, but to more rapid admin¬ istration of the present laws. It would, therefore, involve no addi¬ tional expense in the end. He said the secretary of the treasury and the president were confident the receipts next year would exceed the expenditures. estimated de¬ Mr. Dingley said the ficit for the present year, not counting the money obtained and to be obtained from the Pacific railways, was $28,- 000,000. The anticipatory importation s had placed in the treasury before July 1st $38,000,000. Those importations had reduced the deficit last y.«ar from $56,000,000 to $18,000,000. Mr. Dingley figured out a surplus of exactly $10,000,000 for the coming fiscal year. He described the steady maimer in which the revenue had been increasing at the rate of one or two millions a month. Although Decem¬ ber was generally a bad month for im¬ portations, he said that if the increase for the first nine days of this month were continued, the receipts this month would increase from $25,000,000 in November to $27,000,000 in Decem¬ ber. When ho predicted that the effect of the anticipatory revenues would all be overcome during this fiscal year and that after May or June, 4898, the rev¬ enues would exceed the expenditures, the republican side broke into repeat¬ ed cheers. Mr. Allen, democrat, of Mississippi, concluded the general debate with a humorous speech. The bill was then reported to the house and passed. SAYS LUETGERT’S WIFE IS ALIVE, A St. Louis Editor Declares That the Wo¬ man Was in Boston. The Boston Globe, in its issue of Thursday says: supposed “Mrs. Luetgert, the vic¬ tim of the sausage manufacturer mur- derer, so-called in Chicago, is alive and well. “Mrs Luetgert was .seen in this city during the month of July, acknowl¬ edged her identity, besides giving more or less explanation relative to tlie reasons which caused her to leave her husband, who is again to be tried for his life. “Such is the startling declaration made by Editor John H. Schofield, of St. Louis, to a Globe man.” the tokture was useless. Two Soldiers Frustrated In Attempt On Lite of Sultan. The Athens correspondent of Tho London Daily Chronicle says that two soldiers in the imperial service at tin Yildiz Kiosk, the palace of the sultan, made an attempt on the life of tin sultan, which was frustrated. The sultan had the men tortured in the hope of extracting the names of the instigators, but both succumbed with¬ out revealing anything. ASSASSIN LEGALLY EXECUTED. Mynntt Edach Hanged at Clinton* Tenn.» Fop Killing J. I>. Heck. Mynatt Leach was hanged at Clin¬ ton, Anderson county, Tenn., Wed¬ nesday, for the murder of J. D. Heck, superintendent of the Royal Coal and Coke Co., of Coal Creek. The crime for which Leach suffered death was a peculiarly atrocious one, de¬ and exhibited a depth of human Bhot pravity not often seen. Leach Heck from ambush at Coal Creek on February 17, 1897, and instantly kill¬ ed him. Heck was returning from his work to dinner, and his bride of a month was advancing to meet him, and he fell dead at her feet, the bullet from the assassin’s rifle coming from behind a tree on the hillside, about 250 feet away. have The murder of Heck seems to grown out of a conspiracy that was di¬ abolical in its details. Heck had in¬ curred the enmity of some of the men in a trial before one of the courts, and four men decided that he must be killed. Leach, while in Knox county jail, gave out a confession in which he stated that the men put up $200 for the one of their number who should do the murder, and that they then drew straws and the awful job fell to him. GEORGIA POPULISTS PLANNING. State Executive Committee Hold a Strictly Business Meeting In Atlanta. Tho Georgia populist state executive committee met in Atlanta Wednesday to discuss next year’s campaign, con¬ sider planks for the platform and can¬ didates to stand upon it, and to form¬ ulate plans to reorganize the party and to put it in fighting trim. The committee named the 3d of next March as the date for a state con¬ vention to be held in Atlanta and reaf¬ firmed allegiance to populist princi¬ ples. Chairman John Cunningham pre¬ sided. The sessions were held at the slate capitol. Many of the prominent leaders of the party were present. resig¬ Mr. Cunningham tendered his nation twice as chairman of the com¬ mittee, giving arduous business duties as his reason, hut the committee posi¬ tively refused to accept it. The question of platform was dis¬ cussed, but no recommendations made, it being decided to wait until the ad¬ journment of the legislature, as the workings of that body would materially affect the party policy for the coming year. THE GOVERNOR SUSTAINED. Georgia Legislature Allows Veto of Foot¬ ball Bill to Stand. The governor of Georgia won a close but very decisive victory in the house of representatives Wednesday. There was a fight to override the veto of the anti-football bill which arrayed 107 of the 152 members present against the chief executive. There was another fight on the ruling of the chair that two-thirds of the whole house was re¬ quired to pass a bill over tho governor. It was without doubt one of the most interesting struggles ever witnessed in the house. As a result a precedent has been established on a very impor¬ tant and hitherto undecided question. Had the speaker decided that two- thirds of the members present was sufficient to override a veto, the gov- ernor would have been ruthlessly turned down. On the other baud, his ruling that two-thirds of all the members of the house is necessary met with the approval of a big major¬ ity of those present, and the motion to pass the bill over the governor’s veto was lost, failing by ten votes of the requisite majority. WOMAN CONFESSES TO MURDER. - Miss rales Admits Firine the shots That Kiiied Kern. Miss Delilah Fales, of Waverly, la., has confessed her share in the tragic death of Jerome Kerr. The man was found dead in a lonely wood on the 23d of last August and the young wo- man now confesses she fired the bul- lets that killed him. She was indicted Wednesday and it is said her alleged aecomplice before the fact, a son of the victim, will also be indicted. Miss Fales charges that when she was a mere child of thirteen years the elder Kern betrayed her, and that ever after he harassed her with his ■ atten¬ tions. More than that, he sought by blackening her reputation, she states, to keep others from paying court to her. DURRANT LOSES AGAIN. California Supreme Court Dispells all Hope for Condemned Man. Wednesday afternoon the California supreme court dispelled the last hope of W. H. T. Durraut, the murderer of Blanche Lamontand Minnie Williams, by disposing of his two appeals. This action of the court put at naught the efforts that have been made by the alleged widow of one Blanther. When B1 anther snieided it is said a written confession was found, showing that he was the murderer of the girls,and that Durrant was innocent. Since then the woman who claims to have been the wife of BNntber has made every effort to secure the reopening of the case, WEYLER REJOICES. President’s Message Pleases Former Cap¬ tain General Immensely. According to a dispatch from Barce- Iona, Lieutenant General Weyler. in the course of an interview there, has felicitated himself on being “attacked” by President McKinley in the mes- sage, as this proves that his (Weyler’s) policy was displeasing to the enemies of Spain. He expressed his “snrprise that the Spanish government would tolerate such attacks upon the repre¬ sentative of the nation.” THROUGH THE STATE. Once more, after an exciting con¬ test, S. B. Price has been re-elected mayor of Macon. Smallpox is breaking out in the country around Griffin. Several cases have been moved from Cresswell and others are breaking out. The passage of the Hopkins bill, which confers the elcetion of judges and solicitors upon the people, was one of the moBt gratifying acts of the legislature, and its author deserves the thanks of the state for opening the way to a reform which is sadly needed. The government work on Cumber¬ land sound has been taken away from Captain C. E. Gillette, stationed at Sa¬ vannah, and given to Colonel W. H. H. Benyuard, who is in charge of the government harbor improvements in Florida. Captain Gillette received an order recently directing him to turn over this work and he did so forth¬ with. Why the change was made he did not know, and the officer did not state. It is rumored, however, that the fact that work has been stopped there by the Atlantic Construction company since October 8th on account of the Carter courtmartial had some¬ thing to do with it. Hon. Pope Brown’s announcement as gubernaterial candidate will be made in a few days in the form of a letter to the committa of Pulaski county citizens who transmitted to him the resolutions of a mass meeting held at Hawkinsville on December 1st, when he was commended to the state as the man for governor. Mr. Brown’s reply has not been completed, but he is at work on it, and will probably transmit it to the committee within the week. The mass meeting which nominated Mr. Brow r n was called for the purpose of taking into considera¬ tion the low price of cotton and the depression in agriculture and business, and was a large and representative and gathering of farmers and business professional men. Mr. Watson Says Nay! The effort to force Hon. Tom Wat¬ son into the race for governor has failed. He had an extra issue of The Peoples Party Paper printed the day when the executive committee met to give publicity to the following state¬ ment: “PERSONAL, POSITIVE AND FINAL.—Time and again I have said I would not be a candidate for gov¬ ernor. My friends have been asked to take me at my word. My friends, I think, will do so. “Letters advocating me for any office whatever will be denied space in this paper. Letters upon that subject will not be answered. “Life is short and we might as well save time on a matter like this. “T. E. W.” Will Grow Less Cotton. A large number of representative farmers of Floyd county gathered at the courthouse at Rome the past week for the purpose of discussing plans by which the cotton acreage for 1898 can be reduced. The following resolu¬ tions were adopted: “Feeling sensibly the disastrous effects of the low price of cotton to all bnsiness enterprises in the 1 south, and realizing the folly of grow¬ ing for the coming year a ten-million- bale crop, with full knowledge that by so doing a farther depression in price of said crop will come to us; “Resolved, That we will heartily co-operate with the interstate meeting of cotton growers, to be held in At- lanta on December 14th, in putting into active operation any movement seeking to reduce the acreage of the cotton crop for the year 1898. i “Resolved further, That we ap- point delegates to said convention to represent Floyd county in such move- ment as may be to such end. “Resolved, That we invite all citi- zens interested in the welfare of onr | county to co-operate with us, and in- voke their good wishes and advice to accomplish this result.” Will Mrs. Nobles Hang? I WillMrs.Nobles die the ignominious death of a murderess on the scaffold,or will Governor Atkinson stay the death sentence and decree that she shall spend her remaining days in the penitentiary? the Never in the criminal annals of state of Georgia did questions appeal I with such thrilling interest to the peo- p i e of the state as do these, “if Mrs. Nobles doesn’t hang, it take a regiment of soldiers to hang q us Fambles, the negro who was her accomplice in the crime,” so says a prominent citizen of Twiggs county, “I do not say this rashly. I measure my words when I say it, and I am speaking the sentiment of the best white citizens of Twiggs county. They believe Gus Fambles ought to bang, but they believe first of all Mrs. Nobles ought to hang. If Mrs. Nobles j s spared capital punishment on the ground of fanatical sentimentality, the state had as well make ready to bring soldiers to Twiggs county by compa¬ nies prepared for shooting if an at- t 3 inpt is made to hang Gus Fambles ! after Mrs. Nobles has been saved from the gallows.’ excels The Nobles case probably any case ever tried in America m point of the number and character cf legal pro¬ ceedings takeii to save the prisoner from the gallows. While the Durrant case from California probably excited more national interest, yet the legal pro¬ ceedings taken in that cause are simple i and few by the side of this one.