According to the returns of the keepers of the Boston public baths, there were 250,000 visitors in July.
Lawrence Donovan, who jumped from the Brooklyn bridge some time ago, and escaped without serious harm, on the 7th inst. jumped from the Hungerford bridge across the Thames at London, and was drowned.
William Grady, a worthy young man of East Boston, aged twenty-four years, was murdered by a drunken sailor named Van Buren on the afternoon of Aug. 6th, while trying to protect his slayer from the savage attack of a drunken mate named Coleman.
Edward H. Olmstead, head clerk in the bursar’s office at Harvard college has emigrated with $1200 not belonging to him.
Charles Post, the bunco steerer who swindled an aged citizen of Charlestown, Mass., out of $3000, has been arrested in New York.
Mrs. Erbe, an Ohio bride of six weeks, wants a divorce because her husband has failed to do all that he promised during his courting. If that is going to be an adequate cause for a decree of divorce, there isn’t a marriage in the world that will hold for a month.
Charles Post, the bunco steerer recently arrested in New York, is the famous “Gold brick man” of a few years ago.
Anna Swan, the wife of Capt. Bates, died at Wadsworth, Ohio. They were the largest married couple in the world. Capt. Bates is eight feet tall, and his wife was seven feet nine inches.
Mrs. Josie Richardson of Hoboken, N.J., after tramping for five years through many states in search of her runaway husband, on the 10th inst., arrived with her three children at Birmingham, Conn., and found him there, married to a young woman named Nellie Healy. He was held in $2000 for trial.
L.E. Hanson’s jewelry store in South Berwick was burglarized on the night of Aug. 13th, the safe blown open, and over $2000 worth of goods stolen.
The schooner Mary H. Lewis, which arrived at Portland on the 6th inst, reported having picked up at sea, fifty miles south of Nova Scotia, the day before, Capt. Doughty, two other men, a woman and two children. The castaways were in an open boat twenty-one feet long, with two dories in tow. They were driven to sea by a gale while attempting to go from one Nova Scotia port to another with their goods and chattels; their provisions were spoiled by salt water, and when rescued they were nearly dead from exhaustion, hunger, thirst and exposure. Capt. Doughty was formerly connected with the Salvation Army at Portland, and was charged with committing bigamy there. The Portland officials are looking for him.
The Sea Serpent Returns
The sea serpent has again been seen, this time appearing on Saturday afternoon, Aug. 4th, off Point Judith, R.I., to two fishermen in the sloop Mary Lewis of East Greenwich. Captain Delory, master of the sloop, first sighted a monstrous head about two feet above the water, and about fifty yards distant on the weather quarter. The appearance of the head is described as in general shape like that of an alligator: the jaws looked to be at least five feet in length and were studded with teeth five or six inches long, while the eyes were as large as the crown of an ordinary hat. Directly back from the head ran a huge fin, which was kept rigidly straight as the body was propelled at a rapid rate through the water, the motion being similar to that of a snake in its sinuous windings on shore. The entire length of the creature, as estimated in his passing by the boat, was reckoned at least seventy feet. The captain says it was within about ten feet as it swept by, heading east southeast. Glimpses of its body, which was about the size of a barrel, showed bright grayish scales of large size. This is beyond all odds the worst sea serpent we ever heard of; the old kind never had any head such as that. Nor any such teeth. We do not at all approve of this revised version.
Jury trials in the cases of anarchists in Austria and Hungary have been suspended for one year. In Chicago they suspend the anarchists.
It is impossible to please some people. Chicago is ridiculed because it is not cultured, and Boston because it is.
At Concord, Aug. 13th, in the Concord railroad yard, a freight coupler twenty years old, named Charles N. Sprague, was killed by falling from a shifting engine and being run over by several cars. He was shockingly ground up.
The Dover Daily Times of last Friday gave notice of its discontinuance.
Small tenements are very scarce and hard to be obtained in this city at present. A young working man with a small family, from Portland, wearied himself vainly throughout Thursday, looking for such a house.
The tower of the new Jones brewery is completed, and is surmounted by a flagstaff forty-five feet high above the top of the tower. A substantial railing is to be put around the top of the tower, so that visitors who desire to be made seasick and uncomfortable without any real danger can be accommodated.
John L. Sullivan was knocked out in Brighton, Mass., Saturday night. Rum did it.
New Hampshire Gazette, August 16, 1888
James McDevitt got shaved in a barber shop at Somerville, Mass., Saturday night, refused to pay for the shave, and was stabbed in the face with a pair of shears by the barber.
Ira Robbins of Sanbornton, a farmer, in his sleep early in the morning on the 17th inst., walked off a third-story piazza of the wonolancet hotel at Laconia, and was fatally injured.
John Jacobs goes to the penitentiary for four months, for trying to jump off the Brooklyn bridge.
The Usual Style
At Abbeville, New Iberia parish, Louisiana, last week, a fight took place between the whites and blacks, in which twenty or thirty negroes were killed, and one white man slightly wounded. The “fight,” according to the reports sent north, “involved no race issue” and had no political bearing, but was caused solely by the attempt of a number of young men, mostly clerks in the stores of Abbeville, to reform certain bad characters among the colored people, men and women, by whipping them at night with cowhides. There are two features of this little incident which makes it seem strangely alike many similar ones which have taken place in Louisiana in years past; one is, that it occurred shortly before an important election; the other, that in the desperate fight only negroes were killed. We shall not be surprised should it turn out in this case as in the former ones, that the bad negroes who got themselves killed by the good people had been displaying too much pernicious activity in politics.
The vendetta between the Hatfields and McCoys in Kentucky has been renewed.
Charles E. Batchelder, Esq., who arrived in this city by the nine o’clock train from Boston on Sunday evening, after a trip to Europe, opened court in due and ancient form Monday morning, and assessed an erring fair one $9.90 for making an error of judgment as to the amount of whisky she could carry.
A stage from Rye, carrying a trumpeter and load of passengers, and drawn by six horses, comes up daily and drives through our principal streets. The coach bears the inscription “Quod Hoc Sibi Vult,” a liberal Yankee translation of which would be, “This is just what you want.”
A citizen of Kittery Point, to the manor born, says that if the invasion of a “new set” keeps on as it has of late years, that all those who boast of their descent from the Mason & Gorges stock will soon be completely ousted.
Emma Trazel, a young girl of Philadelphia, revived after being thirty-six hours in a coffin.
New Hampshire Gazette, August 23, 1888
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Our thanks to the Portsmouth Athenaeum, holder of the newspapers from which the items above were excerpted. – The Ed.