|SOME enemy to mankind has recently invented an infernal machine known as the pillow-sham holder, which is attached to the head of the bedstead and works with a spiral spring. It is a kind of refined towel-rack on which you hang your pillow-shams at night so they wont get busted by the man of the house. The man of the house generally gets the pillow-shams down under his feet when he undresses and polishes off his cunning little toes on the lace poultice on which his wife prides herself. This pillow-sham holder saves all this. You just yank your pillow-sham off the bed and hang it on this high-toned sham holder, where it rests all night. At least that's the intention. After a little while, however, the spring gets weak, and the holder buckles to, or caves in, or whatever you may call it, at the most unexpected moment. The slightest movement on the part of the occupant of the bed, turns loose the pillow-sham holder, and the slumberer gets it across the bridge of his or her nose, as the case may be. Sometimes the vibration caused by a midnight snore, will unhinge this weapon of the devil, and it will whack the sleeper across the features in a way that scares him almost to death. If you think it is a glad surprise to get a lick across the perceptive faculties in the middle of a sound slumber, when you are dreaming of elysium and high-priced peris and such things as that, just try the death-dealing pillow-sham holder, and then report in writing to the chairman of the executive committee. It is well calculated to fill the soul with horror and amaze. A raven-black Saratoga wave, hanging on the back of a chair, has been known to turn white in a single night as the result of the sudden kerflummix of one of these cheerful articles of furniture. SOMETHING FRESH. |OUR Saturday dispatches announce that an infernal machine had just been received at the office of Chief Justice Field, and later on, Justice Field, who was in Wyoming Saturday, said to a reporter that the machine was one that was sent to him in 1866, and that last week he sent it down to a gun factory to have the powder taken out, as he wished to stuff it and preserve it among the archives. With the aid of the telegraph and the facilities of the Associated Press, it does seem as though we were living in an age of almost miraculous possibilities. Here is an instance where an infernal machine is sent to a prominent man, and in less than sixteen years the news is flashed to the four quarters of the globe like lightning. How long will it be before the whole bloody history of the war of the rebellion will be sent to every hamlet in the land? How long before the safe arrival of the ark, and the losses occasioned by the deluge, will be given to us in dollars and cents?