Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 215, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1916 — LITTLE ESSAY ON PANTS [ARTICLE]

LITTLE ESSAY ON PANTS

Some Very Interesting Thoughts on Those Worn by Male of the Species. Pants are of two kinds; human and dog. The human pants of commerce are worn mainly by males. But equal rights prevail among dogs. Human pants are worn thicker In winter and thinner in summer. The dog's pants come thicker In the summer. The dog's lungs are the seat of its pants. (Date 1875, Hostetter’s Almanac.) White pants are not a garment. They are a business to themselves. The man who wears them doesn’t work at much else at the time. —When I was small and on a farm, I wore pants that were not new. So far as I could find out, they never had been new. When they had been first worn out, by the first tailless ancestor I had, they had been patched at all the ventilateu places. When the original goods wore out between the patches, the first patches were connected by other patches. And sew on. Where they overlapped—the patches —the goods became about an .inch thick. And when human legs made of any material less durable than vulcanized flint are incased in a set of inch-and-a-quarter Deer Island jeans trousers patched with every kind of heavy goods from horse blankets to remnants of rag carpet—when, I say, any hunjan nether limbs are incarcerated in these bendless tubular garments in a wheat field on a southwest hillside at two o’clock on a clear, still day when the temperature is 110 in the shade and there is no shade, the owner of said legs thinks longingly of the bastile, the stocks, the pincers, the guillotine, the pillory, the thumb-screw, the rack, the stake and other religious pleasantries. I have gone long days in the wheat field in a pair of such asbestos pants lined with sandpaper or barbed wire, and now death or public speaking or fashionable dinners—none of those things has any terror for me. I playfully inquire of death as to the location of Its stinger.—Farm Life.