Ridgeway, Mo., Dec. 13.—The most horrible human butchery ever recorded in this section was committed five miles southwest of this city yesterday afternoon. David G. Spragg in a bit of insanity, murdered his wife and two children and mortally wounded his two step-children with a butcher knife, then took his own life with a rifle. The nearest neighbor of the Spraggs lived almost a mile distant, and it was some time before the news of the crime spread. In a few hours numbers of people arrived from town and an investigation of the scene was made. The most sickening sight met their gaze. Lying thin the yard near the gate were the remains of Mrs. Spragg, mutilated almost beyond recognition and her disheveled hair drowned the pool of blood surrounding her. In the little dwelling in one corner of the sitting room lay the lifeless body of little Caley, six years old, and in the other, Albert , a four-year-old boy. Albert’s head, resting on the slate with which he had been playing, was a mass of coagulated blood and brains, while blood still oozed from the gaping wounds in the throats of each. On the kitchen floor with blood besmeared all over his hands and face and still clenching the terrible instrument of death in his hands and with his head almost severed from his body lay the author of the awful scene.

A woman who has tried to live abroad in “refinement and strict economy,” epitomizes as follows: “In Italy, well, there are many families who take pensionaries, but comfort is not always great there. England, without a shadow of a doubt, provides the best comfort all around, the best table with the most wholesome food, and the most refined style of living. After this comes Germany, with a bountiful table; France, with a more delicate one, perhaps, and Switzerland, with a combination of the two.”

History shows that the red-headed woman is fascinating. They say that the locks of Helen of Troy were of that color; also those of Mary Queen of Scots. There was, not so long ago, a time when this tinge was mocked at by the vulgar. Happily this period is past. Without making odious comparisons with her darker or golden-haired sisters, we confess to being admirers of the red-haired girls, whom the impressionist painter have taken as their halo-crowned ideal. Therefore we hold that whereas the numbers as increased and ins increasing, it ought not to be diminished.

Choose your friends as one chooses a gown, for good wearing qualities. A showy, brilliant girl may have just as good wearing stuff in her as a plain dowdy girl, there being no special merit in plainness. One’s friends must be sincere and kind-hearted, must be loyal to one through everything, and, of course, one must be loyal to one’s friend. Never remain silent if an absent friend needs to be defended. Never indulge in criticism of your friends, nor laugh at their foibles. Never, at any temptation, hurt a friend’s feelings. Try to see their, and to show to your friends your own, best side.

There are some beautiful examples of friendship between women, which were begun when the two concerned were children, and which lasted all through a long life. Maria Hare and Lucy Stanley fell in love with one another when they were seven, and were just as much in love when they both were seventy. They wrote long letters to one another all the way from youth to old age, and had gay times and sorrowful times, as people do, but never ceased to be devoted and true through everything.

Whist was first called “triumph,” a name which was afterward corrupted into “trump.” The eighteenth century saw whist in its primitive form, the whole object of the game being to win tricks by leading high cards or by trumping. Then came the era of Hoyle, which may be said to have lasted from 1730 to 1860, and taught players to think not only of their own hands, but of the other hands also, an to take advantage of the positions of the cards in them. Hoyle also taught that trumps might be more profitably employed than in simple trumping, and showed that hey might be used to disarm the adversary and to obtain secondary advantage in tricking making by other suits of less apparent power. It ws not until 1860 that the philosophical era can be said to have begun, and the origin of the new movement was a knot of young men at Cambridge, England, known as the Little Whist school. This body kept records of its games, but no one thought of making the data known until 1861. Coherence in the system of play was still wanting, and this was supplied in 1864 with Dr. Pole’s essay on the theory of the modern scientific whist.

“The day is not far distant,” remarked a Florida gentleman not long since, when talking with a reporter, “when the term ‘cedar pencil’ will become quite a misnomer. At the present time the average annual consumption of lead pencils is at the rate of about four for every man, woman and child in the country. During the last ten years the quantity of cedar which has been cut in our state to supply the demand of the American and German pencil makers has been enormous, the product of more than 2,000 acres of ground being consumed every year. The cedar of the state will not hold out many years longer against demands of this kind, and already experiments are being tried with other wood. Very cheap pencils are generally made of poplar, which answers fairly well, but which will never be so valuable for the purpose as the old-fashioned and long-tried cedar. Of course, Florida has not a monopoly on the supply of cedar wood, but in adjoining states, where some is to be found, the work of the destruction has been going on quite as fast as in our little commonwealth, and I doubt very much whether any of our children will use pencils made out of the most durable and most easily polished and trimmed wood we know of at the present time.”

Chamberlain, S.D., Dec. 13.—Justice of the Peace Zimmerman of Oacoma, who was recently appointed to the position, to try his hand, went thorough a mock marriage ceremony, in which Erick Lund and a young lady employed at one of the Oacoma hotels, were in the principals. The question that the marriage was legal and binding was afterward raised, and the two principals, in which they supposed was simply an enjoyable and novel pastime, are now considerably worried about the matter. It is claimed that they are legally married according to the laws of the state with the single exception that they have no license to marry. Whether or not this fact leaves the marriage ceremony null and void is looked upon by them as their only salvation.