Woman Hater for 60 Years

1905

Now Daughter of Girl Who Jilted Him Gets His Fortune

Isaac Showers of Webster City, Iowa, religiously kept a vow for sixty years that no woman should cross his threshold or enjoy a cent of his wealth. Now that he is dead the carefully drawn will by which he hoped to perpetuate his vow has been broken, and the bulk of his estate goes to the daughter of the woman who jilted him and made him a hater of all womankind.

Showers came West years ago from New York to make his fortune, leaving behind him a girl who had promised to wait for him. When he became wealthy, as wealth was counted in those days, he journeyed back to claim his bride, only to find that she had married his brother. Without a word he returned to Iowa. When his father died, leaving a considerable estate, he refused to take any share of it because his brother was administrator.

In his own will he left his vast acreage of valuable lands to various schools, aid societies and churches. Mrs. Edward Price, daughter of the girl who jilted him, contested the will and has broken it, and will inherit something more than $250,000.

As Straight Men See Him

1909

The Dead-Beat is Probably the Most Despised Creature That Walks the Earth

No man is wholly free from sin, but so many lesser evils are tolerated that a man should hesitate long before becoming a dead-beat.

Criminals are despised and abhorred, but to the dead-beat all that is coming, as well as the contempt of his fellow men. There is something at once so mean and so little in taking advantage of the confidence which comes with friendship that the hand of every man is turned against a dead-beat as soon as his reputation is well established.

The dead-beat may fondly imagine he is living easy and making money without work, and, of course, he takes no account of the confidence he violates and the hardships he inflicts on others. But, that aside, he really has a harder time than the man who is honest and fair. He is compelled to move a good deal, and peace of mind he knows not. Like other types of crooks, he doesn't prosper, and his finish is more unpleasant than the beginning. — Atchison Globe.


1900

Deadly Blunderbusses of Guatemala

Down in Guatemala the favorite weapon of the native bandits and desperadoes is a sawed-off muzzle-loading shotgun of the blunderbuss pattern, and when they run short of buckshot they sally out to the railroad and steal a few dozen seals, which are simply disks of soft lead about the size of quarters. Pounded into rough balls, they make projectiles by the side of which a Dumdum is an angel of mercy, and when one of their blunderbusses goes off it generally kills everything in sight except the man directly behind it.