Mr. Darlington helped to plane the logs for the first capitol during Lamar’s administration, and also to build the fort around the capitol, to protect it from the Indians on one side and the Mexicans on the other. The capitol was then used not only for the sessions of Congress, but as a church, school, opera house, dance hall--in fact, for all public gatherings. Rounded “The Horn.” Vanburen Crompton, of Allen Dale, Ill., is one of the few men living who went to the California gold fields by way of “the Horn.” Most of the emigrants went overland by wagon, enduring many hardships. Mr. Crompton, then a young man, with two companions chose the water route. Taking a boat at New Orleans, they followed along the Mexican and South American coast, rounding Cape Horn, and then up the western coast, to San Francisco. The ships in that day were slow, and it required many weeks to make the journey. Thousands of men were called westward by the lure of gold, but only a comparatively small number found riches. Mr. Crompton was among the unlucky ones, and returned home after six years. He now lives on the farm on which he was born, and in one of the first frame houses erected in southern Illinois. In the early days there was a fort near the farm, a refuge from the Indians. Still Another “Pick” to Feed. Former President Roosevelt’s fear of race suicide would have received a rude shock had the colonel been in the front office at the Young Men’s Christian Association in Nashville, Tenn., when “Bee,” a crippled porter, and quite a fixture at the building, asked for a day off. “What in the world do you want with a day off, Bee?” asked one of the secretaries to whom this request, coming from Bee, was something unusual. “Well, suh,” said the old negro exultantly, “Ah have a visitor at mah house dis mawnin’. It’s de nineteenth, suh. Ah shore has a hard time to sport ’em, suh. Eatin’s am high and money am mighty procrastinatin’.” Bee’s request was granted. “Up, You Dead!” Cry Saves the Trench. A French lieutenant, now lying wounded in a Paris hospital, has given this account of the thrilling action in which he received his injury: “We were fortifying a trench which we had taken. Behind a barrier of sacks which blocked one end of it, two sentinels kept careful watch. We could work in all security. “Suddenly an avalanche of bombs tumbled down on our heads. Before we could recover, ten of our men were stretched on the ground, dead or wounded, pell-mell. “I opened my mouth to urge them on again, when a stone from the parapet, torn out by a projectile, hit me on the head. I fell unconscious. My stupor lasted a second only. A splinter of shell tore my left hand, and the pain brought me to. “As I opened my eyes, weakened, my mind benumbed, I saw the ‘boches’ jump over the barrier of sacks and invade the trench. There were about twenty. They had no guns, but they carried in front of them a sort of wicker basket filled with bombs.