He gave one or two wriggles, but finding there was something wrong commenced examining its joints from his head down, and when he came to the ninth took it out and laid it on one side, then crawling along the rest of his joints until he came to where the fourteenth ought to be, but where I had put the ninth, took that out and hooked it on to the eighth and then put the fourteenth back in its place, all of which was done in an incredibly small space of time. Again I separated him, mixing the joints up promiscuously and hooking them together, having some difficulty in hooking the tail joint on to the head part, as the hook and eye did not get very well. Letting the snake loose, in one hundred and fifteen seconds he was again properly jointed and I let him go.--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._ OFF THE FARM. "Yes, sir," said the Dakota man, as a crowd of agriculturists seated themselves around a little table, "yes, sir; we do things on rather a sizable scale. I've seen a man start out in the spring and plow a furrow until fall. Then he turned around and harvested back. We have some big farms up there, gentlemen. A friend of mine owned one on which he had to give a mortgage, and the mortgage was due on one end before they could get it recorded on the other. You see it was laid off in counties." There was a murmur of astonishment, and the Dakota man continued: "I got a letter from a man who lives in my orchard just before I left home, and it had been three weeks getting to the dwelling house, although it had traveled day and night." "Distances are pretty wide up there, ain't they?" inquired one. "Reasonably, reasonably," replied the Dakota man. "And the worst of it is, it breaks up families so. Two years ago I saw a whole family prostrated with grief. Women yelling, children howling, and dogs barking. One of my men had his camp truck packed on seven four-mule teams, and he was going around bidding everybody good-by." "Where was he going?" asked a Gravesend man. "He was agoing half-way across the farm to feed the pigs," replied the Dakota man. "And did he ever get back to his family again?" "It isn't time for him yet," replied the Dakota man.--_Detroit Free Press._ A SHELL'S STRANGE EXPLOIT. The late Major Merrill, of Lawrence, was well known in military circles all over the country. When the G.A.R. encampment was held in Kansas City, some years ago, the soldiers of the East and those of the West vied with each other in telling stories of the war. After listening to some pretty tough yarns, Major Merrill related the following, and carried off the honors: "You know, boys, that I served throughout the war in a Massachusetts light battery. During the fighting at Malvern Hill our ammunition was running low, and I was sent to the rear for powder.