Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1874 — Yankee Notions. [ARTICLE]

Yankee Notions.

Incited thereto by certain domestic annoyances, classed here under the generic title .of “servant-galism,” the inventive faculties of our American kinsmen have developed many curious and useful household implements. The Scientific American recently gave a de scription and engraving of a “combination corn shelter, bootjack, hammer, hook claw, tack drawer, pot lifter, and wrench,” which, it is suggested in another transatlantic journal, is open to improvement, so as to serve also as a toothpick, corkscrew, pocket pistol, baby rattle and hypodermic syringe. This, however, and every other similar specimen of Yankee ingenuity, except, perhaps, that wonderful pig killing machine into which the unclean animals were driven in herds and taken out at the other end as bacon and sausages, are eclipsed by a baby washer, just patented, and thus described by its inventor: “You simply insert the begrimed and molasses-coated infant in an orifice which can be made any required size by turning for ten minutes a cog wheel with electric attachments. The child glides gently down a highly polished inclined plane; his lips are met at its terminance by an India rubber tube, from which the infant can draw lacteal nourishment of the purest and most invigorating character, secured for the special purpose, at great expense, from a choice breed of Alderney kine, raised on the estate of her Majesty Queen Victoria, in the Isle of Wight. .While in this compartment, which is lined with plate glass the perturbed spirits of the infant are soothed by its frantic efforts to demolish its own image, reflected in the glass, with a nickel-plated combined tooth cutter, nail knife, rattle and tack hammer, which is thrust into the baby’s hand by an automaton monkey* Fatigued by its destructive, efforts the infant tails to sleep, while the organ at-, tachment plays softly the ravishing melody of ‘Put me in my little bed.’ Then it slips into the third compartment. Here the baby is washed. Another small tube administers a dose of soothing syrup, and the infant glides from the machine, its nails pared, its hair combed, if it has any, ready for the habiliments rendered necessary by the fall of our first parents.” Truly, there can be no better labor-savers than Yankee investors.— Iron. —The Detroit letter-carriers delivered last year 4,196,175 letters, and collected , 1,625,830;,p05tal cards delivered 209,149, collected 131,403; papers delivered 1,416,585, collected 171,151. The increase over 1872 in letters delivered -was 579,908, and in papers delivered 257,537.