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Newspaper
The Abilene Reflector
Location
Abilene, Kansas, United States of America
Date
Dec 15, 1887
Page
6
A poem titled Toil on appears in the Abilene Reflector quoted from Harriet Mabel Spalding as published in Bollow's Monthly. The verse extols relentless effort, duty, and perseverance with imagery of battles, ladders to the sky, and angels guiding the spirit toward higher ground.
The tale centers on Martin Stuckey a former merchant who after bankruptcy and wife death loses his memory. His sons Ephraim Alfred and a lodger named Mr Bib are drawn into a web of debt, murder suspicion and perjury as Alfred is tried for murder after his father vanishes with witnesses placing them on a tow-path near Hammersmith. The case ends with Ephraim convicted of perjury and fraud while Martin’s fate remains intertwined with a dangerous family history.
A Boston Transcript piece imagines a future where unemployed men adopt women’s roles as housemaids to meet labor demand. It lampoons social norms, sketches a parade of disguises, and envisions a domestic scene controlled by female employers under an invented, satirical “petticoat” economy.
A railway tie nursery near Farlington Kansas is described as the largest artificial forest plantation in North America. Owned by Southern Pacific, it contains about 3,000,000 trees of ailanthus and catalpa with ash, planted four feet apart and planned to widen to eight feet. Thinning will reduce to about 900,000 trees at maturity for railroad ties.
The Boston Herald notes Sig. Schiaparelli’s Milan observations of Mars in 1877 1879 and 1882 indicating vast straight canals and possible ongoing construction. It suggests a Martian race with immense powers could span from the Atlantic to Chicago, a claim met with skepticism but arousing curiosity for future study.
The piece argues that professional criminals are morally and intellectually weak, doomed to poverty and punishment. It cites the Jensin James gang, the Stain gang, Captain Kidd, and David Stain as evidence that criminals inevitably fail. It closes with the maxim that the fool and the criminal are brothers, warning readers of the doomed fate awaiting lawbreakers.
A Detroit Free Press fragment recalls a fat woman at a dime museum guiding a boy through curious scenes and banter. The dialogue captures the boy’s questions about fatness, flying, and performances while the mother threats and warnings echo, ending as observers note the downstairs show began.
A collage of short notes covers insurance assets, fashion shifts toward smaller women, imported Norwegian cheese, Texas livestock values, a man builds a refinery from offal, a carrier pigeon in Massachusetts, and rail station weighers surpassing world records. It also notes mutinous sailors, Sunday school humor, and military spending, with quirky vignettes on bricks, hens, walnuts, and ducks.
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