Queer questions and ready replies

The design of this little work is to offer, in a convenient form, to the reading public of the country, much quaint and curious as well as interesting and instructive informatio...

On the 19th of October, 1864, between twenty and thirty armed Confederates left Canada, entered St. Albans, Vermont, robbed the banks, stole horses and stores, fired and killed...

The northern boundary line of this country is marked by stone cairns, iron pillars, wood pillars, earth mounds, and timber posts. A stone cairn is seven and a half feet by eight...

Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It is said that when the place was first settled, there was growing on the spot a cypress (the bark of which tree is of a reddish color) of immense size...

According to a very widely diffused legend of early Christianity, seven noble youths of Ephesus, in the time of the Decian persecution, who fled to a certain cavern for refuge,...

This exquisite poem was written in April, 1867, by Miss Rosa Hartwick, now Mrs. Edward C. Thorpe. She resides at Litchfield, Michigan. She was in her seventeenth year when she w...

Izdubar, an early Babylonian king and hero, was most probably the Nimrod of the Bible. In a fragment of a Chaldæan tradition of the Deluge, discovered in 1872 by Mr. George Smit...

John Adams. By his energy and eloquence he did more than any other man to crystallize the American sentiment in favor of independence. He was a member of the celebrated committe...

The inventor of decimal fractions was Simon Stevin, of Bruges, whose tract, published in 1585, was entitled the “Disme.” But the simple plan we now have was not then invented. H...

In the early days of railways the New Jersey Legislature chartered the Camden and Amboy Railroad, but neglected to impose a tax upon its earnings or plant. A few years later, wh...

The first practical success in steam navigation was made by John Fitch, a native of Windsor, Conn., who had settled in New Jersey as a silversmith. The happy thought of propelli...

An Irish soldier, in a battle against the Turks, shouted to his commanding officer that he had caught a Tartar. “Bring him along, then,” said the general. “But he won’t come.” “...

An enormous opening imagined by Capt. John Cleve Symnes (1780–1829), a visionary American theorizer, to exist in the crust of the earth at eighty-two degrees north. Through this...