Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 March 1917 — Pattens. [ARTICLE]

Pattens.

Americans find it more difficult than the English to understand what Dickens means when he says in “David Copperfield:” .“Women went clicking along the pavement in pattens.” Pattens were an abbreviated form of stilts. The word is also used by builders as the name of the base of.a column or pillar, and so, architecturally, the” pattern is the .support used by a woman to keep her out of the water and mud. From this architectural use has come the secondary application of the word, meaning an arrangement attached to the shoe, so that' the walker is raised three or four inches above the solid earth. Il the mud and water did not exceed that depth, the shoes were thus kept fairly dry. It appears that pattens were not worn solely by the rich, but were luxuries indulged In by the very poor.—ln speaking of a person who was not especially speedy, Ben Jonson uses the comparison, “You make no more haste now than a beggar upon pattens.” In the ballad of “Farmer’s Old Wife” occurs this startling expression: “She up with her pattens, ahd beat out their brains.”