THE AUTOMATIC CLOTHES-LINE REEL.

NO one who lived in Burlington that year, can ever forget the first practical test that was made of the famous “Domestic Automatic” clothes-line reel. It was a curious and powerful bit of mechanism, and was the invention of a man who lived on Barnes Street. This man used to be grievously afflicted because the Scandinavian lady who superintended the weekly wash day ceremonies at his house always took great pains to leave a net work of clothes-line spread all around his back yard. And when he made complaint to her about it she addressed him in the musical accents of Christine Nilsson’s native language, and overwhelmed him with a torrent of eloquence that he could not understand. And when he remonstrated with his wife and daughter about it they laughed him to scorn, and his daughter, who was educated at Vassar, and can hustle her terrified parent out of the house with one hand, told him if he interfered any more in that department around that house he’d get drowned in the wash-tub. So this man suffered. One bitter cold Winter morning he ran out to the woodshed after some kindling, and the first line caught him under the chin and pulled his neck out till it was a foot long, and he ran into the house and frightened his wife into fits by his terrible appearance, and she threatened to apply for a divorce if he ever made faces at her that way again. It was nearly three hours before his neck shrunk back to its natural size. And a few nights after that, he was all dressed to go to a party with his family, and he went bounding down the back yard to see that the alley gate was fastened, and a slack line caught him amidships, let him run out the slack, and then when it hauled taut, just picked him up, tossed the breath out of him, turned him clear over, and chucked him down on his back, splitting his coat from the tail-buttons to the neck. And he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t even breathe, only about thirty cents on the dollar, so he couldn’t answer his wife and daughter when they screamed to him that they were ready, and they concluded that he had run away to avoid going with them, so they went off without him, and never came back till eleven o’clock, and the man lay out in the back yard all that time, trying to die. And one time after that, he was jogging across the back yard with his arms full of about three hundred pounds of hard wood, and he was laughing like a hyena at something he had read in The Hawkeye, when a clothes-prop slipped just as he passed under the line and dropped on his head, raising a lump as big as an egg, and as he fell forward, another line caught right in his mouth, and sawed it clear back to his ears, so that when he smiled the top of his head only hung on a hinge.

Well, these things naturally weighed on his mind and depressed him, but they set him to thinking, and he went to work and invented a patent clothes-line reel, which was inclosed in a heavy cast-iron box, and was worked by a powerful automatic arrangement. You only had to wind up the box and set it for a certain hour, just like an alarm clock, and at that hour the reel would go off, and pull on the line like a team of mules, the spring hook at the other end of the line would let go its hold, and that line would be rolled up at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. He said nothing about his invention, but put up the box and told some lie about it to his family, which is a way men have, and he set it for 7 o’clock P. M., and wound it up strong. Then he watched Miss Nilsson’s compatriot run out the line and adjust the hook, and he went away.

About 7 o’clock that evening, while he was toasting his feet at the fire and reading the almanac, the family were disturbed by unmistakable indications of a fight going on in the back yard between a hurricane and an earthquake, in which the earthquake appeared to be getting a little the best of it. The affrighted family rushed to the back door and looked out upon a scene of devastation and anarchy. The air was full of fragments of linen, and cotton, and red flannel, while shirt buttons, clothes pins, and little brass buckles, were flying like hail. The reel in the iron box was making about 60,000 revolutions a minute, and was whirling around like a thrashing machine, and the line was tearing around the posts like a streak of runaway lightning, and the clothes were trying to keep along with it, and around the posts they were ripping, tearing and snapping more than any cyclone that ever got loose, while where the line shot into the hawse-hole in the iron box, the striped stockings and white shirts and things, and flannels, and yarn socks, and undershirts and more things, and aprons, and handkerchiefs, and sheets and things, and pillow-slips, just foamed and bulged, and tossed wildly, and ripped, and tore, and scraped, until the yard and air were so full of lint that it looked worse than an arctic snow storm. Oh, it was dreadful. It was terrible. Everybody shrieked in dismay.

“Somebody’s at the clothes-line!” screamed the man’s daughter.

“Good heavens!” yelled the man, “hadn’t you taken the clothes in?”

“No!” chorused the women.

The man thought he would save what was left. He sprang at the clothes-line. He caught the flying hook at the end with both hands, and the next instant, before the terrified eyes of his shrieking wife and daughter, he was jerked through the hole in the iron box, a quivering mass of boneless flesh, while his glistening skeleton fell rattling upon the porch.

They gathered his frame work off the porch, and unlocked the box and drew out his covering. He was not dead, so deftly and quickly had he been removed from his framework. They sent for the doctors, but their skill could not avail to get the man together again, and now he sits, limp and boneless, in a high-backed easy chair, smiling sadly at his grinning skeleton, which sits in a chair on the opposite side of the fire-place, grinning sociably at its counterpart, and rattling horribly every time it crosses its bony legs, or scratches the top of its glistening head with its gaunt, fleshless fingers. And thus that poor man will have to drag out a dual existence until death comes to both of him. It is a painful, expensive life, for the skeleton eats just as much as the flesh, and the flesh has taken to smoking ten cent cigars, and the skeleton can’t sleep a wink unless it has a big hot whisky every night at bed time. And all this is the result of wicked, wicked carelessness. A terrible warning to women who leave the clothes-line up after dark.