Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1884 — Cask-Making in China. [ARTICLE]

Cask-Making in China.

According to the Chinese, cask-mak-ing has been known to them for many thousand years. They labored, however, under this drawback: they did not know how to give the final touch by which the lid is fastened—the only method that struck them as feaiable being to place a boy inside while the cooper tightened the hoops and secured the lid in its position. But how was the boy to be got out ? This remained an unsolved problem for 3,000 years. “Yankee Doodle” was written in derision of the appearance of the Continental troops who joined Braddock to beat the French in 1753. Dr. Richard Shackling wrote it as a parody on a song sung in England as a caricature of Cromwell. But it failed in its purpose. as a nation of whistling boys can testify. ~ There is something exquisitely cool in a Yankee’s reply to the European traveler, when he asked him if he had just crossed the Alps: “Wall, now you call my attention to the fact, I guess I did pass risin’ ground.”