Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1874 — About Stove-Pipe. [ARTICLE]

About Stove-Pipe.

The season of the year has arrived when all well regulated families commence to look under the bed, up-stairs and down cellar for the stoves and the stove-pipe, taken down and laid away last June. I know all about putting up stoves. The first thing to be done in putting up—a stove is to strain your back lifting it, and mash your toes wheeling it into place. The next thing is to jump around’ on one foot and jaw your wife, and slur all her relatives way back to Capt. John Smith. When you regain your natural state of sweet temper put the first joint of pipe on to the stove. Patience will do it. It's a great deal easier, of course, to work about ten minutes and then throw the joint at the looking-glass, kick the stove over, and threaten to murder all the tinsmiths in town—but that won’t put the -stove up. A man who will keep his temper can put a joint of pipe on in an hour and a hail by the clock, and Til warrant it. Then put on the second—in doing this you will loosen the first and both will come down together. If you want to jump for the ax and, smash both joints fiat, why, it’s all right, but it’s better to sit down in a chair and gaze out of the window, and appear utterly indifferent. By and by you can kind of fool around the joints, pound the end of one in and the other put, press with your hands, tap with a hammer, and they’ll go together. Then put on the half joint. It was made to lit. Tiie tinsmith will bet a thousand dollars bn it, but you can't fit them—not if you get. mad. Try one end. then the qther, then press, then pound, then jump up and down and yell to your wife that you wouldn't care a cuss if the house was on tire. 1 know men who do that way and they fool around for a day and a half, where 1 wouldn't be over five hours'about it. Having put the half joint on put on the elbow - Stand upon a chair—you’ll be sure to knock all the other pipe down, and no one ever saw stove-pipe fall without tlie joints all coming apart. The pipe won't either fit in or go over, How eould you expect it to? Hammer it with a flat-iron, just to vary the monotony. Then pound it again anil again witTi the hammer to vary some more monotony. Then -press, and* squeeze, and breathe hard and bung your eyes out. It lacks just a fair’s breadth "of fitting, but it might as well lack a mile. Get mad at last, fling the whole pipe down, kick each separate joint, bark your shin on the stove and fall into a chair and commence on By thunder!’’ and deliberately go through the whole programme until you reach “ By gum.” I put up stoves last week and I never had the least bit of trouble. I merely wandered around to a tinner's, whispered *■ Stoves!” in his ear, and they werg up when I reached home, and I saved over nineteen hundred *“ swears” to use in the future, when book-canvassers or sewingmachine agents pull the bell at ten o’clock at night. —“ M. Quad." in Our Fire Si df Friend. "