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Ths Sinking of the Birkenhead, How She Went Down Off the Cape of Good Hope. Visitors to the hospital of the pensioners at Chelsea will, have noticed in the colonnade a ple memorial tablet, placed there order of the late Queen Victoria, record the heroic constancy and pline of the officers and soldiers lost their lives in the wreck of transport. Birkenhead, off the of Good Hope, on February 26, 1852. On January 7 of that year, after barking re-enforcementsamounting to fifteen officers and 476 men for troops engaged in the Kaffir War, Birkenhead left Ireland for the On board were also 166 women children, the wives and families soldiers. All went well until transport reached Simon’s where ten officers and eighteen were landed; the ship continued course on the evening of 25. But the captain, in his for a quick passage, kept so close to the shore that the night the ship got among rocks which line the coast. three miles off Danger Point, at 2 o’clock in the morning of the while all except those on watch sleeping peacefully in their mocks, the ship struck with a shock. The bulk of the men on were young soldiers who had been a short time in the service, yet behaved with as much coolness as though they were on their ground, and with as much courage as if in action in the field. The rush of water on the head striking was sp great that of the soldiers on the lower troop deck were drowned in their ham¬ mocks. The remainder, with all officers, appeared on deck, many only partly dressed, and fell in as orderly and as quietly as on the barrack square. Calling the officers round him, Lieutenant-Colonel Seton. of the Seventy-fourth Highlanders, the sen¬ ior officer on board, impressed on them the necessity for preserving or¬ der and silence among the men. The services of the next senior, Captain Wright, Ninety-first Highlanders, were placed at the disposal of the commander of the ship to carry out whatever orders he might consider essential. Sixty men were put on the chain pumps on the lower after deck, and told off in three reliefs; sixty more were put onto the tackles of the paddlebox boats, and the remainder were brought onto the poop to ease the fore part of the ship, as she was rolling heavily. The commander next ordered the officers’ chargers to be pitched out of the gangway, The plunging and terrified horses were got up and cast over, five of them managing to swim ashore. The cut¬ ter was then got ready for the women and children, who had been collected under the poop awning; and they were passed in one by one. There being room in the boat for one or two more, the order was given for any trumpeter or bugle boys to be taken, A young drummer standing near was told by an officer to get into the boat, but, drawing himself up, he refused, exclaiming that he drew man’s pay and would stick by his comrades. To Try Growing Hemp in Wisconsin. Experiments in the growing of hemp in Wisconsin will be conducted by the agronomy department of the University of Wisconsin in co-opera¬ tion with the United States Depart¬ ment of Agriculture and the State Board of Control. The farms of the State penitentiary at Waupun, the Mendota insane asylum and the agri¬ cultural experiment station at Mad¬ ison have been chosen for the exper¬ iment, which will be carried on un¬ der the supervision of L. H. Dewey, a government agronomist. The plan is to discover what soils in this State are best adapted to the culture of hemp, and whether crops can be pro¬ duced at a price to make possible its use for binder twine. Experiments will also be made with various ma¬ chines for the separation of the fibres from the plant, and to discover the economic value of hemp as a rota¬ tion crop.—Madison Corespondence Milwaukee Sentinel. Wandering Molecules. Even the most solid metals lose some of their molecules by dispersion from the surface, but some curious peculiarities are observed in the pro¬ cess of molecular dispersion. For instance, when a piece of gold is pressed against a piece of lead, some of the molecules of the former dis¬ perse into the lead. The process is, of course, extremely slow, and years are required before its effects be¬ come evident. But, slow as it is, the dispersion of the molecules of gold into a mass of lead takes place faster than into either air or water. The surface molecules of water disperse readily into air, hut refuse to enter oil. The molecules of salt disperse quickly in water, but refuse to enter air, or most solids, in appreciable quantities. Greenland has a population of 11,- 895. The cutter then shoved off in charge of one of the ship's officers, and the women and children were safe. No sooner was she clear than the entire bow of the vessel broke off at the foremast, the bowsprit going up in the air toward the fore-topmast; the funnel also went over the side, carrying away the starboard paddle box and boat and crushing the men on the tackles. The paddlebox boat capsized on being lowered, and the large boat in the centre of the ship could not be got up. * The men were then ordered onto the poop, where they stood calmly awaiting their fate. Within a few minutes the vessel broke in two, cross-wise, just abaft the engine room, and the stern be¬ gan rapidly to fill. In this extremity the commander called out: Those who can swim jump overboard and make for the boats,” but the officers begged the soldiers not to, as the boat with the women and children would be swamped. They were young men ix the prime of life, with all before them, yet no one moved, nor did any sign of terror or fear escape them. Lower and lower sank the vessel into the deadly sea. The old transport shivered, gave a final plunge, and disappeared, carrying with her the baud of heroes on deck and those working below at the pumps. Men of all ages and ranks they were—the colonel and the drummer boy, officers of gentle birch, and men from the workshop, the plow and the mine; but all animated with the same heroic resolution, fortitude and chiv¬ alry—as cool as though they had been on their parade ground, with as much courage as in action in the field. A few managed to cling to the rigging of the mainmast, part of which re¬ mained out of water, while others got hold of floating pieces of wood and were eventually rescued, but of fourteen officers and 458 men no fewer than nine officers and 349 men perished, many falling a prey to the attacks of the sharks, which sur¬ rounded the ships in shoals, waiting for their victims. Every woman and child was saved. « It need hardiy be said that the ap¬ palling extent of the misfortune cast a gloom over the whole community, a grief which was only lessened by admiration for the extraordinary dis¬ cipline and fortitude displayed from the time the ship struck until she to¬ tally disappeared. There was not a murmur till she made her final plunge. The senior surviving officer likened the scene to an ordinary dis¬ embarkation, only a more orderly one than he ever remembered to have wit¬ nessed. The Duke of Wellington, as Commander-in-Chief, gave fitting ex¬ pression to the feelings of the army on the subject; but perhaps the great¬ est compliment ever paid to the mem¬ ory of the brave was the order of the King of Prussia for the account of the wreck of the Birkenhead to be read on three successive parades at the head of every regiment in his army; and it was spoken of in every school in Prussia and Germany.— London Globe. Strength of Rings. Some elaborate calculations, backed by experiments, have been re¬ cently made in England to deter¬ mine the breaking strength of rings. It appears that a ring of ductile metal, like malleable iron, will be pulled out into the form ct a long link before it breaks, and that the ultimate strength of the ring is vir¬ tually independent of its diameter. Fracture finally occurs as the result of almost pure tension, and the re¬ sistance to breaking is a little less than twice that of a rod of the same cross-section subjected to a straight pull. As the ring increares in diame¬ ter there appears to be a slight ap¬ proach toward equality, with double the strength of a bar. Thus a three inch ring, made of three-quarter-inch iron, broke at nineteen and one-half tons; a four-inch ring at 19.9 tons, and a six-inch ring at twenty tons, the strength of a bar of the same metal being ten and one-half tons. Seeing Lightning Strike. In July last William F. Rigge of Creighton University had the unusual fortune to see a bolt of lightning strike an isolated cottonwood tree about a quarte- of a mile away. The flash appeared as a “superb column or shaft of light about 46 ■> or 5 00 feet high and eight to twelve inches in diameter, perfectly straight, ver tical and steady.” The shaft was white, but its base was tinged with red. This column seemed to stand between two di- erging trunks of the tree, and lasted about two seconds. Afterward Mr. Rigge found that one of the two trunks of the double tree bad its bark stripped off in the shape of a ribbon six inches wide and two yards- long. The othe trunk showed 1 two furrows beginning ten fee t above the und. They It ked as if they had oeen plowed by a piece cf steel, There was no sign of fire. LW j L~BjJM 2 A SERMON ’ Kf r tAg rev' [rriV-]kNDEI^oN'W^A'F Subject: Bcth-el. Brooklyn, N. Y.—Preaching on the above theme at the Irving Square Presbyterian Church, Hamburg ave¬ nue and Wierfield street, the Rev. Ira Wemmell Henderson, pastor, took as his text Gen. 28:19, “And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; * * * * this is none other but the the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven, * * * And he called the name of that place Beth¬ el." The scene is as grand as the lan¬ guage is inspiring. And the sublim¬ ity of the picture and the elevation of the language are only to be ex¬ plained upon the assumption that at this time and under the conditions that are described Jacob enjoyed a special and glorious spiritual experi ence. Jacob was journeying from Beer sheba to Haran. He stopped on the way, took stones for a pillow and lay down to rest, the day being spent, for the night. “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And behold! the Lord stood above it.” Is it any wonder that Jacob ven¬ erated the place? Here he found blessing. Here was inspiration. Here was the manifestation of the ever¬ lasting God. It was but a stone in the open, roofed with the arching heavens, walled by the horizon be¬ yond which his vision could not pen¬ etrate; but here he had seen God. And he called the place Beth-el. No one is so foolish as to imagine, that the stone and the surrounding locality were any more sacred in and of themselves than were a thousand similar stones upon which Jacob might have rested his tired head or were a hundred other places in the quietude of which he might have found repose. But upon that stone his head had rested when the God of Abraham and of Isaac reiterated to him the covenant He had made with the fathers. In that spot he had been the recipient of the richest joy that the heart of man may experience in this life or the mind of man desire: a vision of the living God. And so he poured oil on the stone and conse¬ crated the place where he had tarried through a memorable night. What else would any man have done? The event was not common¬ place. The vision was beatific. The covenant was tremendous both as to its authorship and its duration. Con¬ sidered from any point of view the occasion was to be commemorated and the locality was forever invested with a subduing and soul warming at¬ mosphere that would be effective with us to-day were we within the scope of its influence. Jacob would have been neither courteous nor hu¬ man if he had not set the place as in a sense apart. If we may remember heroes with monuments and good men with statuary, shall not Jacob commemorate the revelation of Jeho¬ vah with an oil soaked stone? If we are conscious of a thrill as with bared heads and reminiscent minds we stand in Independence Hall or about the graves of the martyr dead shall we not admit the sacredness of the spot where God showed Himself to the leader of His people? All of which is not to push sense over, the border line of reason, or to make the logical become illogical. Jacob called the place Beth-el, the house of God. And so we call our churches. Every church is a Beth-el or it is nothing better than a club¬ house. A church is not simply a col¬ lection of stone and brick and plaster and wood and glass and iron and nails bound into a building, any more than the stone was the sanctuary or the place where Jacob heard the voice of God the shrine. A church is more than an edifice as the shrine was something more than a geogra¬ phical or geological entity. We con¬ secrate our churches to the benefi¬ cent uses of the religious life of the people not because we consider that God abides simply and solely within them or that a blessed brick is holier than an unblessed stone. We enter •ur churches, rather, I should say we should enter our churches, because in a real way they stand for an exper¬ ience, they teem with reminiscence, they commemorate individual and so¬ cial blessings and visions of the sov¬ ereign God. Jacob called the place Beth-el be¬ cause he had a compelling religious experience. And so we should ven¬ erate our churches. A church that lacks the spiritual atmosphere, that is not the expression of a deep spirit¬ i ual conviction, that commemorates : no visions and that is ineloquent of mighty spiritual exaltations, is not a | church. It is a fraud. ! A church is a Beth-el. And as such, j it should be revered. Within it | should be found blessing and inspira¬ tion, out of it should flow the influ¬ ! ences that tend toward God and that militate for the weal of men. Beth-el .was notable as the com¬ memoration of a blessing. And what blessings have we not had within the confines of our churches. Where such holy reveries, such -glorious in¬ spirations, such lasting joys, such revelations through the abiding of a tnon spirit? Here we have seen *u glory of the Lord, here ,we have ) w n the power of His love, here we have fed upon His promises and been augmented in the riches of His ; grace. Here, as was Jacob at Beth-el, Real Estate f Fire Insurance Fort Valley Realty & Development Co. The leading Fire Insurance Companies Represented. Office Over Exchange Hunk, Port Valley, Ueorgla. f ( have we been inspired, filled with larger hopes, urged on to nobler and to holler achievements, filled with the energy that no man may describe, in effnble, intensive and divine. Here we have felt the warmth of the spir itual atmosphere and have clasped hands with God. The Influences that rolled with pre-i dieted vigor from the simple shrine at Beth-el ought to flow and will, from any well appointed church. The cnurch is not a pool, it is a stream. It is rather a dynamic than a static. From the church should well forth the influential streams of righteous¬ ness and of truth and the healing of the nations. The world owes an In¬ calculable debt, as do we, to the church, and the church should by her unceasing and compounding influence for good and for God, and unremit¬ ting service for men, place the world ever more largely in her due. The churches must be Beth-els or many of them never could withstand the abuses to which they are lout. Only upon the assumption that the spiritual influences that move within them are born of God can we under¬ stand how many of them survive the desecrations to which they are sub¬ jected. The average fair is enough to kill any church. The average church entertainment, paltry and puerile as it is expressionless, would be a death blow to the social activi tics of any organization less hardy. What with moving pictures and wax works and spelling bees and turkey suppers and men's smokers and wom¬ en’s gossip, it is wonderful that we have any veneration for churches at at all, that we find any blessing, any inspiration within them, and any in¬ fluence moving from them. The church should be Beth-el. It should be the house of God. There, too, we should see the ladder stretching down from heaven- there the ascending and descending angels. There we should see God. There wa should make covenant with Him. There we should enter into the pos¬ session of His interminable promise. There we should have a glorious, an exalted spiritual blessing. FEMININE NEWS NOTES. Mary Brush, of Davenport, Iowa, invented a boneless corset. London regards smoking in res¬ taurants by women as good form. Mrs. Kendall, the actress, invented a very handsome and popular lamp¬ shade. The Japanese youth gives his sweetheart, instead of an engagement ring, a piece of silk for her sash. The Women Suffrage League, of New York City, wishes the support of the labor organizations in its agi¬ tation for political equality. Mrs. Cadawalader Jones, president of the Woman’s Auxiliary to the S. P. C. A., surprised the society by frankly declaring herself in favor of vivisection. Empress Augusta Victoria while riding with the Emperor at Sans Soucl fel from her horse, fortunately, however, suffering no other injury than bruises. There are in Europe 10,000 women and girls who earn a living as artists’ models. It is strange to say that there are not ten among them who possess a perfect face and figure. Mrs. W. H. Eaton, widow of the letter carrier who was drowned sav¬ ing the lives of two boys, was granted an annunity of $300 and $25 a month for her children from the Carnegie Fund. Mrs. Owen Jones Wister, mother of Owen Wister, novelist, is dead in her home in Philadelphia. Mrs. Wister, who was in her seventy-sec¬ ond year, was Miss Sarah Butler, a daughter of Pierce Butler and Fanny Kemble, the actress. That Senator Platt, of New York, paid his wife $25,000 cash and agreed to give her $10,000 a year for five years was brought out in a suit brought against the Senator by Mrs. Platt’s former counsel to recover money advanced to pay some of her debts. Life Not a Holiday. Sooner or later we find out that life is not a holiday, but a discipline. Earlier or later we will discover that the world is not a playground. It is quite clear that God means it for a school. The moment we forget that, the puzzle of life begins. We try to play in school. The Master does not mind that so much for its own sake, for He likes to see His children happy; but in our playing we neglect our lessons. We do not see how much there is to learn, and we do not care. But our Master cares. He has a perfectly overwhelming and inexpli cable solicitude for our education; and because He loves us He comes into the school sometimes and speaks to us. He may speak very softly and gently or very ,loudly. But one thing we may be sure of: The task He sets us to is never meas¬ I ured by our delinquency. It is meas ured by God’s solicitude for our pro- | gress; rnea measured d :,l_'ly that solely the by scholar God’s love; may j I dacated when he arrives at ] his F; r’s home.—Henry Drum- I mond. New Grand Army Heads. Auburn, Me It Department of Maine, G. A. It., elected Woodbury K. Dana, of Westbrook, department commander. j j ! ! Kennedy’s | j Laxative i | Cough Syrup Relieves Colds by working them out of the system through a copious and healthy action of the bowels. Relieves coughs by’ cleaaslng the mucous membranes of the throat, chest and bronchial tubes. ti As pleasant to the taste as Maple Sugar *» Children Like It* For BACKACHE-WEAK KIDNEYS Try GeWitt's Kidney and Bladder Fills Sure and Safa Sold by Holmes Clark & Co. W. H. HAFER, DENTIST. Fort Valley, Georgia Office over First National Bank, C. Z. McArthur, Dentist FORT VALLEY, GA* Office over Slappey’s Drug Store. A. C. RILEY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, WRIGHT BUILDING, Fort Valley, Ga. Practice in all the courts. Money loaned. Titles abstracted. Tire $ Cife Insurance fl. D. Skcllic Office Phone No. 54. FORT VALLEY, GA. C. L. SHEPARD, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, Fort Valley, Ga. Office Over First National Bank. TONSOR1AL ARTIST For anything in the tonsorial line don’t fail to call on WILLIAMS Next Door to Post Office. Experienced workmen and courteous at* tention to all. Everything up-to-da^#. Ml SAM LOO, FIRST-CLASS LAUNDRY FORT VALLEY, GA. PRICE LIST. Shirts, plain.............. 10c Shirts, plain or puffed with collar............ ,121-2c Suits cleaned....... 50 & $1. Pants pressed........ . ..25c Collars............... ...2 1-2 Capes, collar or fancy 1>C Cuffs each per pair 5c Chemise........... 10c Drawers........... 5e Undershirts....... 5 c Socks, per pair ... 5c Handkerchiefs...... 2 1-2 Handkerchiefs, silk 5c Shirts, night, plain. 10c Coats............ .. .15 to 25c # Vests............ ... 15 to 20c Pants......,..... ... 25 to 85c 2 1-2 to 5c Table cloths...... ... 10 to 25 Sheets........... ......7 1-2 Pillow cases, plain .......5c Napkins.......... ......2 l-2c Bed spreads..... ..15 to 25c i > > lankets......... 25 to 50c i .. Lace Curtains.... 20 to 25c Ladies’ shirt waist......15 to 25c Skirts 20 to 85c ONLY NATURAL. ou ?r . r I be in avoid Ther :oo much to suit the f ill IX r.