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HOW NEW YORK SHOPS. $20,000,000 Pass Over the Great City’s Counters For Holiday Things. S^me person with a love for large figures has said that in Christmas week $•20,000,000 is handed over counters of this city as tribute to Santa Claus, eays a New York correspondent. That sum may sound suspiciously great, and tho statistician might be charged with the evil of exaggeration, but when 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 $t> per person is large, or small, accord ing to tho linaucial rank ol the reader, and in New York it is particularly dif ficult to strike a fair average, because of tho 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, • pearl necklace that cost him $1,500,- 000 togather the fifteen feet of stringed pearls together. That same Christmas 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 the most part of this district esteem themselves lucky if they can spend $2, and as this sum has to supply the Christmas din ner, as well as to bring Santa Claus to au abnormally large family of children, sharp bargaining must bo done. Push carts lino 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 squeeze this cau be brought down to nine, or even eight cents. Grand street is tho centre of the great East side. The Bowery boy buys the Bowery girl a ninety-nine- cent diamond ring there, and she reciprocates by purchasing a seven- caret, soventy-nine-oont diamond stud. the subnrWn of New York do tns within fifty ISi e iheir shopping. es Latent Style In IlalrdreMtac. The latest style of hairdressing, that of the Duchesse d’Angonleme, daugh ter of Louis XVT. and Marie Antoin- A Remarkable Rat. The Cincinnati Zoo boasts a curiosity in tho way of a white rat. It closely resembles a miniature white boar and has two long tasks growing out of the sides of the mouth and curving upward to fully twice the length of the head. The rat is not more than a week old. Its parents are tho ordinary white rats, beloved of the small boy, as also are its brothers and sisters. Being in » cage, somewhat removed from view, no one paid particular attention to the white rat family. When tho little monstrosity was discovered he was nearly a week old. The keeper promptly removed him from the rest of the family and is bringing him np most carefully. When molested tha SCIENTIFIC SCRAPS. ette, which was the popular vogue in the early part of the century, when the bonnie duchesse was exiled to Eng land, is having a revival in France. It is said that seldom have Parisian ele gantes encountered a fashion more dif ficult to revive than this one. It is a most complicated method of hairdress ing, but perhaps for this reason it is likely to be more popular. In order to accomplish it it is necessary to draw the hair straight up from the nape of the neck, tie it firmly on the top of the head, and then arrange it so as to imi- The mild climate • of the southern portion of Alaska is due to the Japa nese current. % After several years of trial, pulleys covered with papier-mache are gain ing « favor among British machinists. The tint of birds’ eggs, especially the light colors, are apt to fade, on exposure in museums to too great sun light. This is the case with the green ish blue eggs, as those of the wurre. By experiment the darker colored eggs of olive brown or chocolate hue have been found to undergo little change. Lord Kelvin estimates that the age of the earth, since it cooled suffi ciently to support life, is about20,000,- 000 years within limits of error, per haps ranging between 15,000,000 and 30,000,000 years. Eminent geologists, in discussiug these figures recently, say that they think the true age is nearer 60,000,000 or 100,000,000 years. The longevity of astronomers has often been noted. A French compiler finds that Fontenelle lived to 103,Car- loine Herschel to 98, Cassini to 97, Sir Edward Sabine to 94, Moiran to 93. Sautiui and Sharpe to 91, Yates, Airy, Humboldt, Robinson and Long reached little thing grunts like a pig instead of . 90. The long list of those who lived \1 f lY~‘ C HAS TTSKS LIKE A BOAB. making the noise common to its kind. « f C >// \ Yfr XVeddlnc Threads. In certain parts of China the yonng women wear their hair in a long, single plait, with which is intertwined a strand of bright scarlet thread, which denotes them bo marriageable. A law of the State of Massachusetts prohibits towns from offering more than $500 as a reward for tho arrest and conviction of a murderer. Rlffgest Sweet Potato Grown. V>V. -env Y5 U as r<£ r\1 i; -1; w / Y&WeYE. St V -n I.I •w HOW NEW YORK SPENDS ITS MILLIONS FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS.' more than one child found delight in • nickel toy. Christmases back John D. Rockefeller sent a check for $100,- 000 to the Fifty-seventh Street Baptist church as a holiday offering, and the same day the organ grinder of Mul berry Bend dropped a couple of cop iers in the plate of the Italian church in Roosevelt street. So much for the extremes of Christ mas giving in NeV York. Fully one-half 'of the Christmas shopping is done the day and the night before Christmas; notone-half finauoi- ally, but numerically. The moderate ly poor, tho poor and the very poor must 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, aud often times the extent of that gift determines the scope of tho Christmas shopping for tho family. Again if Christmas comes near the end of the week, as it does t\ris 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 Eve than earlier in the week, Toys and games and clothing have suffered from the rough handling, there are rips and tears which, however, cau 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 reducation in his prices. Again, he does not want to aingle piece of his Christmas stock over for a year, as he loses the use of the monsy. Bo 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- Jiies are quick to recognize these ed- 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 tho other hand, stops and buys a five pound box of candy for forty cents, stows it away somehow, and goes on ns happy as the millionaire riding through tho Park in his victoria. Tough girls not almve sneaking a roll of ribbon under their wraps, were it not for the hordes of detectives which fill tho stores of Grand street, buy to tho limit of their purses, but buy sharply. “lam going to buy a bennie for Jimmie," says oue to her friend. “Say, mister," to the floor walker, “where do I buy dor bennie?” “Hey?” “Der 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 caught hold of a man wearing a blue overcoat and held tho coat for the ethers inspection. “Oh, a coat—on the fifth floor front.” tate bows. There must be a parting from ear to ear, but it must not be far back from the forehead. All the hair behind this division must be brushed back aud tied togather with the back hair. The front hair has a central parting. There is an arrangement of short curls brought into a bunch at each side by means of a side comb, or there may be a group of coques to right and left of the parting. These coques A Kansas farmer, Johu CirariaiR, of 1 Abilene, has grown a sweet potato which he says is the largest in tho world. It is twenty-five inches in cir cumference and nine inches in length. It weighs nine and three-quarters pounds. WERE BORN IN 1815. Ladle* Who Claim to Be the Oldest Liv- injT Twins In the Country. The claim of the Newell brothers, of Missouri, that they are the oldest pair of twins in the country, will not hold, according to a correspondent of the Chicago Times-Herald. Mrs. H. H. Johnson, recently of Kankakee, 111., 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, when 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 “What d’ye ti'nk of dat? De guy didn’t know what a bennie was. He carry a be new on Grand street." Then they take the elevator and she tells the man to let her off “where dere sellin’ de bennies." Fourteenth street and Sixth avenue is where the biggest part of the city, a goodly section of Brooklyn, a large part of Jersey and a big portion of all were originally called “oomb curls," because they were not allowed to fall, but were stiffly arranged and held in and are as place by email combs or haixpini. ^ seven children. The sisters are both in fall possession of their faculties active as women of sixty- five. ^ to 80 includes Halley, Newtou, Her schel, Kant and Roger Bacon. A Massachusetts mau has patented an X-ray machine for examining jew els consisting of means of producing the rays, a support for the jewel opaque to light, but transparent to the Roeutgeu rays, a screen for con verting the rays into light after the passage through the jewel, a mirror for reflecting the rays and eyepieces for examining the reflected image. * * Compressed air is used in place of the cld-fashioned well sweep to raise water from a well, the bucket being hung on one end of a rope with a hoi-« low air chamber and a number of weights at the opposite end. The air is pumped into the reservoir to raise the weights and lower the bucket, which is raised by exhausting the air and allowing the weights to fall to the bottom of the well. ^ A singular effect of a bee sting is told by an English astronomer. The sting was not painful, but in about fifteen minutes the face of the victim, a lady, hpcame violently flushed, and blains or white blisters appeared a 1 over the body, arms and legs, aad then, more curiously still, she developed a sharp attack of asthma. This yielded to home remedies, aud the blisters turned from white to red, disappearing in a few hours. # -- More than half the streets of Berlin already are lighted with the best kind of gas glowligkt —perfectly white, find fire times as powerful as the old flame. Aug. Ml,483 out of tho 22,036 str eet lanterns were fitttd up with the new' light, and the remaining 10,523 lan terns are to follow during the next six months. This new light effects a large saving to the city. In future but 10,- 000,000 cubic meters of gas will be needed, against 17,000,000 before, a saving of a big sum per annum, with fivefold the illuminating power. . ^ /VJ Varioa*. Kind* at Drug Habit*. Since many kinds of medicine began to be put into tablet form it is much easier to fall into the habit of giving yourself continuous treatment. Th« soda mint habit is the moat common of all. Yon will find men nowadays who buy their tablets in quantities, and crave them as the cigarette smoker craves a smoke. The strong pepper mint tablet is also in great demand. Then there are cloves and sharp sting ing “breath sweeteners"—all intended to calm a disordered stomach or have a biting and warming effect. A druggist told of one customer who maintained that he would die of dyspepsia were it not for the constant use of peppermint chewing gum. Others will have nothing but the spruce gum aud the old-fashioned “rubber” gum. Men and women who would not take an alcoholic stimulant under any cir cumstances keep their small pocket! stuffed with roots and herbs. The calamus root or the “sweet flag” is the favorite nibble with the herb victims, although the lovago root is more stim ulating. There is a gentian habit and a gin seng habit. It often happens that some astringent root or herb is used as a substitute for tobacco, with the result that the tobacco habit is cured but is succeeded by a craving for the cure. Kolafra tablets and other prepara tions containing the kola nut have lately come into use. The kola nut is a stimulant and tonic,and as it is more powerful than most of the dried roots and herbs, it is sure to be popular among the “fiends."—Chicago Record. Her Specialty. “She has a wonderfully forgiving nature,” said one yonng woman. “I offended her, unintentionally, and when I spoke to her about it she said she was perfectly willing to overlook the past.” “Yes," replied Miss Cayenne. “That is a specialty of hers.” “What?” “Overlooking the past. She says that she is only twenty-eight years of «ge."—Washington Star.