Democratic Sentinel, Volume 21, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 July 1897 — HE DROPPED HIS PIPE. [ARTICLE]

HE DROPPED HIS PIPE.

And the Loss Naturally Caused Him Feme Annoyance. One afternoon last summer I was standing on the great Suspension bridge just below Niagara Falls looking at the great cataract and admiring the wonderful colors of the green and blue river 200 feet below. Several workmen were engaged in painting the bridge, and I became interested in their operations. It required no little engineering skill to rig up an apparatus by which to enable a painter to traverse the giant guy rope cables which radiate from the center of the bridge, fanshape, toward either end of the structure. A painter’s platform four feet square was suspended from one of these cables by a trolley arrangement, a grooved wheel running on the cable. By means of a rope attached to tills wheel a man on the bridge could draw the platform from the river bank—the terminus of the cable—to the bridge above, and as the platform passed along the cable a workman sitting on a common chair on the platform would paint the great iron rope above his head and behind the trolley wheel. I was especially interested in the work of a Swede, who, perched on a small platform, was painting one of the Canadian braces. He had begun at the end of the cable on the Canadian shore, far below, and had been pulled’up the cable’s steep incline toward the bridge until perhaps two-thirds of his journey had been completed. There was absolutely nothing but air between him and tihe seething river 200 feet below; but there he sat, on a swinging platform, methodically plying his brush and complacently smoking a short clay pipe. How it happened I don’t know. But the man on the bridge suddenly let the rope slip out of his hands. There was a sharp cry of alarm from the startled painter as the platform began to spin down the incline, with constantly increasing momentum. It seemed as if the poor fellow must inevitably bo dashed against the rocky precipice and tumbled into the river a mangled corpse. The slack of the rope on the bridge, however, became entangled around a brace and the perilous descent came to a sudden end. The Hying platform stopped with a jerk. The chair, a pail of paint, a brush and a clay pipe went sailing into space. The painter caught a corner of the platform just in time to save himself from following them. Two minutes later the platform had been pulled up to the bridge, and the Swede was given a chance to stretch his legs again in safety. The man on the bridge had not a word to say. He was as pale as a corpse and trembled like a leaf. But the Swede did have something to say, and he said it without the slightest tremor of emotion in his voice. “You,” he remarked. “Ay tank you skal lalnd me your pipe. Lalk big fool Ay drop mine."—Chicago TimAa-Hainl.!