Miscellany: Apr. 19, 1926

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Ostrich

In a strong iron cage behind a wire fence in Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, lived George Washington, male ostrich. He was not friendly. Keepers knew that his bleak eye, long nose and haughty air of breeding had made him many an enemy, but they believed that he was safe. The cage and fence, they thought, would keep scornful George from violence. One morning last week they found him dead. Dreadful marks seamed his long throat, marks that made clear that the naked hands of a man had strangled him. In the cage, near his huddled body, they found a man's overcoat, a blood-stained handkerchief. The ground in the vicinity bore testimony to a fearful struggle.

Two days later police discovered and took into custody one William C. Mclntyre, 28, upon whose forehead yawned a gash. Mr. Mclntyre identified the ostrich-trampled overcoat as his, acknowledged that he had been drinking, dimly remembered having lately taken a beating from some one, was astonished, mortified.

Egg

At Paris, in the Quartier Latin, one Juliana Hastre, young Argentine singer, was gowning for dinner when a messenger delivered to her an egg of prehistoric proportions, an Easter token from her friend Mlle. Van Hong Lu in India. Taking the present with her to the evening's revel at another friend's house, Mile. Hastre exhibited its glossy chocolate surface and sugary frosting, caused mouths to water at the thought of sweet liqueurs or sugary stuffing within, caused shrieks of horror when, cracking the shell, she released half a dozen scabrous tropical cockroaches and a vicious, adult scorpion, which immediately plunged, its stinger into her hand. While Mlle. Hastre received medical aid, friends of Mlle. Van Hong Lu loudly denied that she could have connived in the hoax.

Great-Grandmother

Upon a trampled front-lawn heaped with furniture—a charred bureau, a mattress, some rugs, a torn pillow, the kitchen chairs— Harold Kronk and family of Goshen, N.Y., stood watching their house burn down. Almost everything had been saved; only one worry lingered in the minds of the Kronks. Where was the baby? "He's up there," cried Mrs. Harold Messinger, 75-year-old grandmother of Harold Kronk, great-grandmother of the missing baby, pointing to a window through which the smoke streamed in livid grey-green waves. She broke the restraining grasp of the firemen, of Mr. and Mrs. Kronk, dashed up the cinder-hot stairs, bent over the baby's crib. Smoke made her eyes dazzle. She could see nothing in the crib. Was it possible that the baby had been carried out after all? Heat licked at her skirt, singed her arms; terrible heat burrowed in her eyesockets. No, there he was; he lay with his head on his quilt, his legs squirming pinkly on his pillow. Great-grandmother Messinger picked him up, carried him out, collapsed into the arms of Mr. Kronk. Last week the Twentieth Century Club of Goshen gave her a medal for heroism.

Eccentric