A Swimming Record
Not long ago a tramp beat all know records by swimming twenty-seven miles in thirty minutes. The feat was not undertaken voluntarily. The hobo merely tried to steal a ride from St. Louis to Chicago on the rear of a locomotive tender. When the train started he fell over backward through the open manhole into the water tank. The noise of the train drowned his cries for help, and he was obliged to swim until the first stop was reached, at alton. When taken out he was nearly dead, but the engineer was so unfeeling as to call his attention to the fact that the water was only four feet deep and he might have stood up. The conductor, equally unfeeling, asked him for his ticket, but the hobo replied that he had not come by rail, but by water.
—Exchange.
[Contributed by Michael Strickland]