Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/180

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N automobile accident which caused considerable interest because of its novelty occurred in Quebec recently. A seven-passenger car partly filled with passengers was ferried across a river on a scow operated by the old overhead cable system. As the scow, with its load, approached the shore it was made fast to a stake and the automobile proceeded to run off. Since the bank at this point was steep, the machine moved slowly, but its front wheels had gone only a few feet before the weight of the car, now shifted to the rear wheels, caused the scow to sink by the head. This

downward movement caused the stake to be pulled from its position and the next instant the scow was pushed out into the stream.

With brakes applied, the chauffeur did his best to arrest the backward movement of the car, but it slowly backed into the river, settling on the bottom under fifteen feet of water. Fortunately, the occupants jumped before the car struck the water. A diver was later sent down to fasten a chain to the front axle, after which the car in spite of its weight was brought to the surface rapidly and with very little difficulty.

HE head of a laundry in Rochester, New York, a man possessed of imagination as well as of money, recently presented the local Y. M. C. A. with a shirt worth more than its weight in gold. It was nothing but an ordinary, white, stiff bosomed shirt. No costly studs were planted in its buttonholes, but across the front were inscribed words which made it a check for two thousand dollars to go toward the erection of a big, new Y. M. C. A. building.

Perhaps the donor felt that a suspicious public, its temper as well as its clothes frayed from many uncharitable encounters with steam laundries, needed reminding that even a laundry owner may have a heart.