A Lady's Long Trance: A Spasm, A Comatose State

1878

A Lady's Long Trance

The Des Moines (Iowa) Register of a recent issue, says: Yesterday evening there stopped at the Given House Mr. and Mrs. Shadle, of Guthrie county, accompanied by some attendants. They are escorting to Mount Pleasant Mrs. Shadle, who has been in an almost continual trance ever since last June.

Some time last March, without any premonitory symptoms, the lady became insane, wild at first, and finally violent. She was visiting a sister near her own residence. Soon after her arrival there she began to talk strangely, and a few days later was raving with insanity, and at times very violent. On the 12th of June Mrs. Shadle had a spasm, from which she passed off into a comatose state, which continued without intermission until October 1, when she awakened and conversed, although incoherently. The next day she again fell asleep and has not since been awake.

She is fed by forcing her mouth open and placing the food inside. Her respiration is regular, but a little more frequent than that of most people of her age, which is twenty-nine. She has one child, a boy of four years. The first evidence of wakefulness she has exhibited since the 2nd of October was the day before yesterday, when she was carried from her home to a vehicle to be transferred to the cars. The little boy climbed into the wagon and placing his arms about his mother's neck, kissed her. Tears immediately rolled from the closed eyes, but they remained closed, and there was no other sign of waking. She is to be taken to the asylum for the insane at Fort Madison.


Ingenious Pickpockets

Lucy H. Hooper says that the Parisian pickpocket has invented a special mode of theft. The thief enters the omnibus, chooses his seat beside some well-dressed and apparently affluent person, and remains motionless and apparently absorbed in his reflections. But between his finger and thumb he holds a very small grain of shot attached to a black silk thread of extreme fineness and strength. When his next neighbor opens his or her pocket-book to pay the fare, the thief adroitly throws his grain of shot into the pocket-book, retailing the end of the silk thread in his hand. The pocket-book is closed and replaced in the owner's pocket, grain of shot and all. The thief profits by some extraordinary jolt of the vehicle to fall against his neighbor, and in that moment he draws in the silk thread and gains possession of his prize.