The Colfax Chronicle

Tom Thumb is rather fat, bearded and looks his age of forty years, according to correspondent of the Boston Herald, who visited him a few days ago at his home in Middleboro, Mass. His mother, and his married brother and sister live in the neighborhood. He showed a tiny coat that he wore over thirty years ago when first exhibited, and said: "I used to slip into this easy enough, but now, I don't believe an ordinary sized man could more than squeeze two of his fingers into that sleeve. Those were the days when I was a little chap, and no mistake. I used to weigh only about twenty pounds, and measured an even eighteen inches high; but now," slapping his thigh, "I'm a portly old fellow of seventy pounds, and I guess I'm a little rising of forty inches. I stopped growing tall--queer to speak about my being tall, is't it?--when I was about twenty two years old. Since then I have been maturing and getting stout." Tom denied Barnum's story about a rivalry between him and Commodore Nutt for the hand of Lavinia Warren. "Vina never looked on him except as a boy," he said, he was so much younger than she." As to the reports of Nutt's marriage with Minnie Warren, who recently died, he said: "People fell naturally into the idea because they were of the same age--he was born in April and she in June 1849--and traveled so much together. Sometimes hotel keepers would tell us that such and such a room had been set apart for Mr. and Mrs. Commodore Nutt," and they were surprised to learn that there was no Mrs. Nutt." Major Newell, to whom she was married in July of last year, is twenty-three years old."