Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1875 — Hanging Ont Clothes. [ARTICLE]

Hanging Ont Clothes.

If you are a good husband of course you have helped your wife to hang out clothes, and you know how it is yourself. It always blows furiously when anybody is a washing. It is an old saying that “ washing raises the wind,” and there is truth in it. And in the winter washing day is always fearfully cold. Your wife is tired—women always are on washing days —and she says how she does dread hanging out those clothes, and Temetnbering'thaT'ar _ The* altar you solemnly promised to love, cherish and protect her you generously offer to help her hang them out. Thermometer at zero, and wind bio.ving at the ra’e of ninety miles an hour. The clothes-line is always stretched on the north side of the house, with especial reference, we suppose, to just such an occasion as this. Your wife takes one handle of the basket and you take the other.. Some designing pen on has emptied some water on the doorstep, which has frozen, and you are not so cautious as you should be to sec to it that, you stand firm, and the first thing you know you are down on the ice, and away goes the clothes-basket down over the hill, with your wife'hanging to it like the tail ol a kite. You recover yourself and start after the fugitives and bring them back. You think you will begin witii hanging out a sheet. A sheet will be plain work. You take one up gingerly by the corner and drag it to the line, with the oilier coiners trailing. “ Ob, John!” erics your wife, in a tone of dismay, “do be more careful! See. what a dreadful smucb you have got on the sheet!” You seize the other corner and flap it over the line, and it freezes stilt as a board the instant it touches there, and is unmanageable as a sheet of zinc. You give it a savage pull and a twist to get it out straight, and the line is loose and springs before you, and then when you let go it springs back again and takes your hat amidships, and away it goeSi and the wind pounces on it and whirls it away to a fence corner, where you -possess yourself of it, well filled with snow.-anil in good condition to obey a well-known medical prescription: “ Keep the head cool.” You return to the charge, blowing your fingers, and your pantaloon legs full.of snow, and your wife tells you you should have put on mittens. Miltens be confounded! you tell her in an emphatic voice. You fly at the sheet again and your wife fells-you-to-leL that sheet alone and hang out something you can manage. She recommends you to try a shirt.

So you try a shirt, and yotr hang it over the line with the neck part up just as it is worn, but your wife tells, you to hang that shirt as it ought to *be. The other extremity belongs up. She takes an inverted view of things. You try to obey, but the thing has frozen fast to the line; and in attempting to break the unfortunate attachment you tear off the collar-band, and split two clothes-pins, and knock a piece of skin off the back of your hand. Oh, the unutterable contempt which is expressed on the countenance of your wife! She calmly reminds you of the fact, which women are so fond of enunciating. that men are a nuisance, and requests you to go info the house about your business. But you persist in your benevolent efforts, and seize upon a miscellaneous pile of ruffled things which are worn only oy the gentler sex and you bear them in a wrinkled wad to the line and fling them on. The wind whirls half of them away in a petrified condition, and you cling to the others in such a way that the line cannot bear the pressure and it snaps in two and down comes the whole, concetn into the snow and dirt of that back yard and freezes there in less than a minute. It will take gallons of boiling water to thaw those clothes up from the ground, and they must go back to the rinse again and your fingers feel like icicles, and your wife is—excited, and we draw a curtain over the scene. ’ But we want to say that the man who, under such circumstances, can keep his temper and not lapse into profanity is ready for the Millennium, and may expect to be translated any day, after the manner of Enoch. — K<ite Th»rn, in N. F.