Everybody knows how it is with an eel. You might as well try to hold a streak of lightning. When he has covered your boots with slime, he bites the line off and wriggles back into the water. When you have put on a new hook, you get a bite, and jerk out a muddy snag, and then you catch one small minnow and find that you have been sitting in a puddle of water, waiting for him to nibble. As your bait is exhausted, you conclude to go home, where you can put some ointment on your blistered hands and face, and pick the ticks out of your skin and have sewed up the rents made in your trousers by the blackberry bushes, and get ready for the mosquitoes in the evening. There are some very peculiar charms about rural life, and the farmer is the noblest man on earth. But as for me, I believe I prefer existence in an alley in the city to even temporary residence among the agricultural population. THE NEWS OF ALL NATIONS. Failed to Get Guinea Eggs. Last autumn Clinton B. Struble, of Penn Yan, N. Y., bought one hundred guinea fowls of a dealer in North Carolina, with the intention of raising guineas on his Esperanza estate for the Rochester market. The flock has had the best of care and has been fed with every variety of supposedly egg-producing concoctions known to Yates County poultrymen. Notwithstanding this treatment, which has been kept up for over six months, not one egg was received. Recently Mr. Struble took a poultry expert home with him in the hope that he might find out what the trouble has been. The expert found the flock in a splendidly healthy condition, but all male birds. “Dead Man” High, Not Dry. “There is a dead man on the roof of City Hall,” was the telephone message to Mayor Mitchel’s office, in New York City, the other afternoon. Like alarms followed from tenants of skyscrapers around City Hall Park. Peter Chieffo, the janitor, was sent aloft to investigate. The janitor found a man stretched out asleep on the sunny side of the clock tower. There was an aroma of rum about him and a spirit of rebellion in his heart. He protested volubly at being awakened. “’Snice’n’ warm up here,” he said; “lemme ’lone.” Chieffo helped him down, first by the ladder which leads from the attic to the skylight on the roof, then down two flights of spiral stairs, and lastly down the three remaining marble flights to City Hall Park. How he got up there with the bundle he was carrying is a question which puzzles the members of the board of estimate. The visitor was unable to explain or even to give his name. Sudden Finish of a “Bad Man’s” Reign. In the early spring of 1877 the then wild-and-woolly little mining city of Joplin, Mo., began to hear rumors of a great find of shallow lead on the banks of Creek, just across the State line in Kansas. Short is a little stream that rises in the western part of Jasper County, Missouri, and, after meandering around a few miles, empties into Spring River, in the eastern part of Cherokee County, Kansas.