Ostrich

In a strong iron cage behind a wire fence in Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, lived George Washington, male ostrich. He was not friendly. Keepers knew that his bleak eye, long nose and haughty air of breeding had made him many an enemy, but they believed that he was safe. The cage and fence, they thought, would keep scornful George from violence. One morning last week they found him dead. Dreadful marks seamed his long throat, marks that made clear that the naked hands of a man had strangled him. In the cage, near his huddled body, they found a man's overcoat, a blood-stained handkerchief. The ground in the vicinity bore testimony to a fearful struggle.

Two days later police discovered and took into custody one William C. Mclntyre, 28, upon whose forehead yawned a gash. Mr. Mclntyre identified the ostrich-trampled overcoat as his, acknowledged that he had been drinking, dimly remembered having lately taken a beating from some one, was astonished, mortified.

Egg

At Paris, in the Quartier Latin, one Juliana Hastre, young Argentine singer, was gowning for dinner when a messenger delivered to her an egg of prehistoric proportions, an Easter token from her friend Mlle. Van Hong Lu in India. Taking the present with her to the evening's revel at another friend's house, Mile. Hastre exhibited its glossy chocolate surface and sugary frosting, caused mouths to water at the thought of sweet liqueurs or sugary stuffing within, caused shrieks of horror when, cracking the shell, she released half a dozen scabrous tropical cockroaches and a vicious, adult scorpion, which immediately plunged, its stinger into her hand. While Mlle. Hastre received medical aid, friends of Mlle. Van Hong Lu loudly denied that she could have connived in the hoax.

Great-Grandmother

Upon a trampled front-lawn heaped with furniture--a charred bureau, a mattress, some rugs, a torn pillow, the kitchen chairs-- Harold Kronk and family of Goshen, N.Y., stood watching their house burn down. Almost everything had been saved; only one worry lingered in the minds of the Kronks. Where was the baby? "He's up there," cried Mrs. Harold Messinger, 75-year-old grandmother of Harold Kronk, great-grandmother of the missing baby, pointing to a window through which the smoke streamed in livid grey-green waves. She broke the restraining grasp of the firemen, of Mr. and Mrs. Kronk, dashed up the cinder-hot stairs, bent over the baby's crib. Smoke made her eyes dazzle. She could see nothing in the crib. Was it possible that the baby had been carried out after all? Heat licked at her skirt, singed her arms; terrible heat burrowed in her eyesockets. No, there he was; he lay with his head on his quilt, his legs squirming pinkly on his pillow. Great-grandmother Messinger picked him up, carried him out, collapsed into the arms of Mr. Kronk. Last week the Twentieth Century Club of Goshen gave her a medal for heroism.

Eccentric

The editor of the Manhattan Social Register marked for deletion from that compendium last week the name of Mr. McEvers Bayard Brown, a descendant of the 16th mayor of New York, Nicholas Bayard. Death had brought to an end the career of perhaps the only man who ever lived on a seagoing yacht for 36 years, with steam up day and night, yet never sailed away.

The yacht is the Valfreya, built for Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Mr. Brown, when he purchased her, sold another yacht (in which he had sailed from Manhattan never to return) to the Grand Duke Michael of Russia. He ordered the Valfreya--sleek and opulently resembling J. P. Morgan's Corsair--to steam into the little harbor of Brightlingsea, off the Essex coast of England. That was in 1890.

Thereafter, whenever the moon was not full, Mr. Brown almost daily caused his chef to heat large panfuls of gold and silver coins as hot as possible on the galley stove. The beggars of Brightlingsea, anxious to humor his whims, appeared in rowboats and caught the coins in their bare hands as Mr. Brown hurled the bits of gold and silver overboard with a shovel. If the beggars attempted to use gloves, he hurled boiling water upon them instead. When the moon was full, he hurled nothing at all. Occasionally he wrapped lumps of coal in -L-100 notes ($500) and heaved them at submissive heads. Countless eyewitnesses testify to his evident delight in scorched palms and bruised flesh. For many years he journeyed often to London and personally drew the gold and silver which he scattered, from a bank which allegedly received some $20,000 a week from the administrators of his property in the U. S. For years a group of London beggars made pilgrimages to Brightlingsea.

Mr. Brown expended about $4,000 a month on the upkeep of the Valfreya. The 18 men who comprised his crew earned their high pay and seldom stayed with him long. He possessed a large squirt gun which he delighted to fill with bilge water in the dead of night. Thus armed he stole upon sleeping members of his crew, inserted the tip of the gun in an ear, pressed the plunger. Two private secretaries left him after suffering this treatment. Mr. Brown crept upon a third secretary at night, clipped off his mustache without waking him, squirted.

Occasionally he would invite newly employed sailors to drink with him. As they raised their mugs of rum he whacked them in the midriff. In winter, he would scowl upon the shivering beggars:

"What do you want, you scum of the earth? Money? Tell the cook to bring a panful. But you shall dive for it today! A cold plunge for all of you!"

Mr. Brown's antipathy to women was such that he very seldom allowed them on board, though he often tolerated male visitors. To one woman who took off her hat he cried: "Put it on! Only liars take off their hats!" In the awkward pause which followed, the visitor twiddled her thumbs. "Madam," said Mr. Brown, "I do not know what your signal means, so I cannot answer you."

To a pressman who visited him, he said:

"Are you always what you appear? Are you not sometimes a woman?"

The visitor described Mr. Brown's appearance as follows:

"Bayard Brown is a man of about the average height, as elegantly dressed that night as he ever was for an Easter Sunday stroll on Fifth Avenue. His figure is rounded but his clothes fitted perfectly.

"His iron-grey hair was brushed straight up from his broad, handsome forehead, and his iron-grey beard came to a round point beneath a chin well formed and determined.

"His eyes were the alert grey eyes of an up-to-date New York business man. His hands were white, soft and well cared for. When he spoke his voice was unusually pleasant, his accent that of a cultivated and polished New Yorker."

The fact that Mr. Brown was never molested or restrained by the local British authorities is allegedly accounted for by his very large contributions to all the local charities. Last week many flags in the vicinity were flown at half mast in his honor. Allegedly, he realized that he might some day be restrained as insane and therefore kept steam up at all times, ready for instant escape. His wealthy Manhattan cousins, R.F. and W.B. Cutting, long ago evolved a formula for dealing with pressmen, declared themselves "ignorant of Mr. Brown's plans."