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Many Items of Interest.
The newspaper Fire and Water, devoted to fire protection, water supply, etc., in cities, relates to singular accident, which came near being serious. In a dyeing establishment near this city a man was cleaning a flannel gown in a tub of benzine, fully 100 feet removed from a flame of any kind. He was simply rubbing the garment with his bare hands, when as he describes it, "suddenly the whole tubful of stuff went up in a blaze," and he escaped death of serious injury only by an instinctive and instantaneous backward leap. The friction caused by handling the flannel generated electricity, which ignited the vapors aristing from the benzine. This, the editor days is in its details the first instance of the kind which has yet to come to our knowledge, and the fire having been quickly extinguished by the employes, would probably never have been reported had not one of them casually mentioned it.
The American Architect relates the following incident of England's architect, Mr. John Ruskin. The other day some incautious Christians, who had built a cheap mission chapel in the suburbs of London, applied to this great man to help them pay for it. Instead of money they received some advice, of greater value, probably, than any pecuniary gift that, the critic could bestow. "Why," he asked them, "did they build churches that they could not pay for?" "Why did not they preach behind the hedges, rather than run into debt?" "And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built," he was kind of enough to add, "an iron church was to him the damnablest." Mr. Ruskin is said to