Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 December 1874 — Tying Up Bundles. [ARTICLE]

Tying Up Bundles.

There is one kind of a package that the non-professional mancannot do up without losing his temper and profaning the hallowed radiance and the peaceful quiet of the day with immoral remarks. That is a bundle of shoes. He goes to the store and watches the deft motions of the clerk who ties up half a dozen pairs, more or less, in one great symmetrical package for the unhappy man to take home to his wife and daughter. Of course not a single pair will do; there never was an instance of such a thing happening yet. So when the man gets ready to go down to the office the next morning his wife tells him that he’ll have to take those shoes back, and she guesses that they will go down to the store in the afternoon and get fitted there. And to this his daughter adds a sarcastic remark about bringing home shoes that he could use fbr a cistern cover. The man asks if the shoes are ready and his wife says yes, she tied them up last night. She then brings him a great shapeless package, wide open at both ends, and a ream of paper pinned around the middle. If woman suffrage ever does carry and a woman is elected Sheriff, when she has to hang a man she will pin the rope around his neck. Words cannot describe the snort of contempt with which the man pulls out those ridiculous pins and rolls a small colony of shoes on the table. It is only equaled by the calm complacency with which he tells hjs wife to “ gim’me that string." and proceeds to tie up the bundle store fashion. As he proceeds with the work he is; a little disconcerted to observe what a huge mass four pairs of shoes will make. It didn’t look nearly as big at the store. He piles them up first with the toes all the same way, and the first movement he makes to wrap the paper around them they shoot out, heelward, like a morrocco avalanche. Then he builds them up, heels and toes, and laying them on the sheets of thin paper like the clerk did begins to roll them up. They bulge out away from him and he makes a sudden dive at them that starts a rent in the paper. Then they begin to out at one end and he drives them in with a blow and a remark that sends them out at the other. By this time he has come to the end of the first sheet of wrapping paper, which comes up with a sudden flip, shoots clear over the pile and spreads out bn the other side, and there the shoes are, just where he began with them. The mah dtoesn’t lost his patience yet; he only says to his wife and daughter that he’d “ like to know what under the sun they’ve been doin’ to them shoes,” and rearranges the paper for another start. He is a trifle nervous and has more trouble to ~ keep the shoes in their places: they bulge and slip and buckle, but he gets them rolled up at last. He puts one end of the string between his teeth and, lifting the package gingerly, passes the string underneath it and is reaching around it a second time when the mass develops alarming symptoms of a general disintegration, and the man

clasps it to his bosom and throws his arms around it and leans forward on the table with it, and the next minute shoes foam out all over him, under bis arms and between his fingers and over his shoulders. It occurs to him that he never thought there were so many shoes in the world as come tearing out of that paper. Then he does get mad. He says: “ Gim’me that newspaper,”- and be makes a kind of a cone out of it, and shoots the shoes into it and bends down the ends and flattens in the corners, and chucks it against the wall, and sits on it to bring it into shape, and ties it up with yards of string, and flatters himself that if it is big nobody can tell what is in it. But before he gets to the first corner he is making furious clutches at fluttering corners of the paper, and he goes through the streets at last with all the shoes in the bundle staring at the passers-by through grinning apertures innumerable in the paper. And when the shoe-man looks at those shoes he is ready to swear that some one has slept in every pair of them, or else that they have been dropped into a feed-mill. The man who has not been educated to it from early infancy cannot tie up a bundle of shoes.— Burlington Hawk-Eye.