125 years ago

february 14, 1890

Marion will miss Levi Billings, who will soon remove to Utah. We don’t like to think of it.

Dr. Werthner, of Lincolnville, was shaking hands with old Marion friends Wednesday. He reports La Grippe quite prevalent in his section of the county, and has himself prescribed for over two hundred cases.

Mr. J.B. Crouch, the talented but misguided editor of the Florence Bulletin called on the leading paper in this block last Saturday. Prohibition and protection and other things may be everlastingly ruining the country, as Crouch often pretends to believe they are, but if so he seems to escape the general wreck remarkably well. We never saw him looking so fat and saucy, even under the Glick and Cleveland regime.

Thompson & Farr have accumulated so much money that they have had to buy a safe.

The writer, in a moment of mental imbecility or something of that sort, signed, with a lot of other foolish fellows, a petition for a six foot cinder walk up the A.D. Billings’ hill, but we are now, in a more lucid moment, confident it will be much worse than the four foot board walk. What fool we mortals be, anyhow.

Frank Weller still insists that he intends to start a new paper in Marion. He proposes to call it the Free Lance. A friend suggests that if he would call it the Free Lunch it would be in great demand.