Miscellany: Sep. 20, 1926

"TIME brings all things" Faith

In Havana, one Angel Arango pleaded and pleaded with air pilots to take him aloft. He wanted to step off the wing of a plane and drop into the Gulf of Mexico from an altitude sufficient to test a combination parachute and buoyant belt he had invented. Pilots old and pilots young refused to budge. To them the device did not look practical. Last week, however, Senor Arango found his man, clambered joyfully into a cockpit, waved goodbye to watching thousands, crept out on the plane's wing tip at 3,000 feet, stepped backwards into empty air. The parachute clung to his back like a bad dream, unopened. The Gulf of Mexico rolling absently splashed once. Rescuers found no whole bone* in Senor Arango's corpse.

Gossip

In Nice, Prefect of Police André Gueulechien gazed across his desk, pensively caressing his pointed beard. Towards him from the door, assisted by gendarmes, staggered a woman, gurgling unintelligible things out of a blood-slavered mouth. Prefect Gueulechien listened attentively. He recognized the woman as a Mme. Jaquin, a Belgian lately released from the jail. But he could not understand her. Peering closely, he perceived that her tongue had been cut out, evidently with a sharp knife, close to the root. He frowned. It would be a vexing investigation, for the Jacquin woman could neither read nor write, and her friends were few. Her late jail sentence had been for gossiping viciously about neighbors.

Clown

In Budapest, Bela Morvay, clown, put mad new touches upon his old familiar act at the Volksgarten Meirkus, convulsed his audience as never before, worked up to a climax where he imitated a man committing suicide by eating white powder from a little paper bag, fell to the ground writhing comically, waved away other clowns who rushed to his assistance, cried, "Let me die!" and did so, grinning. Dismissed, he had failed to find a new job.