Nevertheless, when the orchestra tuned up for the one-hundredth-birthday celebration at 660 East 164th Street, New York recently, Mrs. Osborne led her fifteen descendants in a tango step. Four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren joined in the applause which greeted this skillful attempt to reconcile Puritan ancestry with modern liberalism. One hundred years rest lightly on the shoulders of this direct descendant of Thomas Mayhew, the first governor of Martha’s Vineyard, who received a royal grant of Nantucket Island in 1641. She is hale and hearty, takes a long walk every day, and sews several hours at a stretch. “Yes, I use glasses,” commented Mrs. Osborne, anticipating the next question, “but understand, now, that I don’t have to use them. They rest my eyes--that’s all.” When she came to New York City from Columbia County, a woman of one and twenty, Manhattan Island above Fourteenth Street was mostly pasturage. “Yes, Broadway was nothing but a pathway for cattle, and Fourteenth Street was a little lane!” she exclaimed, in a flash of reminiscence. After the death of her first husband, John Wilson Higgins, Mrs. Osborne married Samuel Osborne, who died many years ago. Of the eight children she has borne, two are living, Miss Emily Higgins and Mrs. Victor Smith. Beginning in the afternoon, Mrs. Osborne’s birthday party lasted into the evening, with friends and neighbors dropping in to leave flowers and extend congratulations. Respirator Appeal Swamps British. One day’s appeal through the London press has given the English army all the respirators needed, and the press bureau issued the following notice: “Thanks to the magnificent response already made to the appeal in the press for respirators for the troops, the war office is in a position to announce that no further gifts of respirators need be made.” “It looks,” says _The Daily News_, “as though every woman in England who could find time for it made respirators. No doubt reports from soldiers who had suffered from fumes had a tremendous effect in prompting the instant answer to the appeal of the army, but the response was of such an extraordinary nature as to set up a record.” Great Waste in Potatoes. Doctor Carl L. Alsberg, chief of the bureau of chemistry in the department of agriculture, said, in a talk to the New York Society of Chemical Industry at Rumford Hall, 50 East Forty-first Street, New York, that millions of dollars’ worth of potatoes and grain were destroyed by excessive moisture in this country every year, when they could be utilized for making alcohol and other purposes. The United States, he said, had relied on Germany for a supply of potato dextrin used as an adhesive, when it could easily be obtained here by simple processes from the potatoes which are annually allowed to rot in the Pacific coast States. America Leader in Tobacco Trade.