Rensselaer Republican, Volume 14, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1882 — The Lost Sardine-Opener. [ARTICLE]

The Lost Sardine-Opener.

Every well-regulated family should have its own private, exclusive and always handy sardine-opener, lor of such is the kingdom of serenity. In this opinion we are braced by our friend Scollops of the retail firm of Frills A Scollpps. Mecca is a snug, semi-rural Irene on Jersey City Heights. Scollops is addicted to sardines; in fact he is so passionately fond of the oil-'oaked delicacy, that he gets tearing mad when the folks up at the house use the last box and iuform him of it just as he has decid -d on having a noon-day wrestle with his favorite lunch. Then he rages* like the dog-star on stilts. But, “to our relations,” as the poor nephews said when they heard that Uncle Ben Slivers had cornered half a million on Hannibal and St. Jo. Scollops has a servant girl who of kitch-en-ware and tools is the champion utilizer. To her a sardine-opener hath many aspects. It is consecutively a tack-hammer, an ice-pick, a stove-plale lifter, a screw-driver and h pot-cleaner. How often Scollops has annihilated that guileless maid-of-all-work with bis vocaTdynamite, can only he numerically rivaled by Dr. Bliss’ bulletins. One day in the recent drouthy August, the sardine-opener was in active demand. Nobody could find it. Scollops fumed, Mrs. S. flouted, and the servant girl hunted, but the missing utensil was as non est as the noblest work of the Almighty. They searched high and low. Closets were reopened with nervous jerks, ami drawers banged to with unsavory dictionary words. Just as virtue had ceased to be a patient, the missing article was found tightly wedged in a suspected rat-hole. It is there yet, and as immovable as the pyramids of Egypt. In due time Scollops concluded his overstrained remarks, and docked the girl’s wages $1 a month. A new and every way desirable sardine-opener has been purchased and put under lock and key in the same bureau drawer where Scollops keeps bis hair-dye and endowment policy.— (“Hops and Hilarities,”] A T . Y. Newt