Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 August 1893 — Airtight Canvas Boats. [ARTICLE]

Airtight Canvas Boats.

Airtight canvas boats, built expressly for boys and timid ladies’ use, are much used at the fashionable summer resorts now. The man who has a reckless and ambitious son of seven is tired of giving rewards to big fishermen who make it a practice to keep a weather eye out for drowning boys, and who is equally weary of administering punishment “at the end of the slipper,” has solved the most difficult problem of his life by buying an airtight, .unsinkable boat. He gives the boy a hundred yards of stout rope, one end of which is tied to the boat, the other secured on land. He feels happy and care free, and goes to town feeling that the boy is safe, for if the boy cuts the rope after the prescribed distance is run he never learns it, and “where innocence is bliss” none of the boy’s admirers would care to make him any wiser, for at a lake resort a boy with a generous heart and a boat is not to be made an enemy of.