round on his crutches on the depot platform, laughing and jesting over
the ease with which he had beaten the corporation.

"He afterward fell off a Wabash train at Edwardsville and claimed to
have sustained serious injuries, but in this case the company's
attorneys beat him and proved him to be an impostor. In 1879 he
stumbled into the telegraph office at the Union Depot here, when Henry
C. Mahoney, the superintendent, catching sight of him, put him out,
with the curt remark that he didn't want him to stick that crutch into
a cuspidor and fall down, as it was too expensive a performance for the
company to stand. He beat the Missouri Pacific and several other
railroads and municipalities at different times, it is claimed, and
manages to get enough at each successful venture to carry him along for
a year or eighteen months, by which time the memory of his trick fades
out of the public mind, when he again bobs up serenely."

Anomalous Suicides.--The literature on suicide affords many instances
of self-mutilations and ingenious modes of producing death. In the
Dublin Medical Press for 1854 there is an extraordinary case of
suicide, in which the patient thrust a red-hot poker into his abdomen
and subsequently pulled it out, detaching portions of the omentum and
32 inches of the colon. Another suicide in Great Britain swallowed a
red-hot poker. In commenting on suicides, in 1835, Arntzenius speaks of
an ambitious Frenchman who was desirous of leaving the world in a
distinguished manner, and who attached himself to a rocket of enormous
size which he had built for the purpose, and setting fire to it, ended
his life. On September 28, 1895, according to the Gaulois and the New
York Herald (Paris edition) of that date, there was admitted to the
Hopital St. Louis a clerk, aged twenty-five, whom family troubles had
rendered desperate and who had determined to seek death as a relief
from his misery. Reviewing the various methods of committing suicide
he found none to his taste, and resolved on something new. Being
familiar with the constituents of explosives, he resolved to convert
his body into a bomb, load it with explosives, and thus blow himself to
pieces. He procured some powdered sulphur and potassium chlorate, and
placing each in a separate wafer he swallowed both with the aid of
water. He then lay down on his bed, dressed in his best clothes,
expecting that as soon as the two explosive materials came into contact
he would