The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1894-06-04
A BACHELORS SUTTON.
It Generally Comes Off When He's In q
Hurry-How He Sews It On.

Hurry-How He Sews It On.
The button generally comes off when he
is in hurry. That is all the common
sense there is in buttons. And it flies off
into unknown cracks and corners of the
room and lodges under the bedstead or the
bureau, and the man who has lost it peeps
and looks and feels around in the dark
places with his hand and fishes up carpet
tacks stuck to his fingers and eomotose
spiders and lethargic wasps and eobwebs
and cigar stubs and everything else except
the lost button.
Then he gets down on his knees and
peeps under the bedstead and banks the
skin off his legs against the carvings on
the bureau, scrapes his shins on the rocker
of chair and gets up with strong Ian
guage on his lips and flies at the clothes
brush and dusts off his pantaloens and
knocks over the cologne bottle and spills
So worth of fragrance on the landlady's rs
cents yard boarding house carpet and
wishes the man who invented buttons had
been hanged long before he ever thought
of inventing anything.
And he holds up his garments with one
hand and hunts around for another but
ton. He looks in all the drawers, under
the bedstead, and in all the vases, and in
all his pockets, and in all the boxes, and in
various other places for he knows by ex-
perience that he is just as liable to find a
button in one place as in another, if he
finds 1t at all.
He has place for everything, and ev-
erything is in it's place-the only trouble
there is about it is to find the place.
At last he sees a button in box of let
tiers and "billets doux" and locks of an
Gent sweethearts hair, and he seizes on it
and grabs a rusty needle and threads the
point of it till he is tired and succeeds in
getting the thread in the split condition.
He pulls and pulls and cannot get it any
farther and confounds the party that sold
him that needle and vows he will carry the
thread back and tell them it won't fit any
needle he has got. Then he pulls it out
and scrapes it down with his knife and
tries again and this time is successful.
Then he places the button with nathe-
NAUTICAL exactness right where it was be-
fore and begins to jab. But he hasn't pull
ed out the old stitches, and nobody can
sew on a button through half spool of
"button cord" left in the cloth. He dis
covers this, digs it out and plunges the
needle viciously into the cloth and gets
half an inch of it in his hand and drops
the button and the garment and slaps his
hand on his leg and wishes the whole con-
Germ elsewhere. Then he hunts up, the
camphor bottle and deluges himself and
begins the job over again
The thread knots at the first stitch-it
always does-and he tugs and pulls and
gives 'syank," and it breaks, and the
button flies off at tangent, and the man
loses patience and the spool of thread at
the same time, and then he puts himself
together and says he viii not be conquered
by a trousers button. He will never bend
his mighty intellect to such little thing
as sewing on a button and fail.
And he gets the button and the thread,
and he starts off afresh, and he does the
job, and there are knots all around that but
ton, and it looks as if it had been wrecked
on a lee shore of ends of linen thread, and
it is half an inch below where it ought to
be, and the man puts the thread away in
the combcase and sticks the needle into
the window curtain and closes the drawer
with a kick and tells his male friends that
for sewing on buttons and seeing to things
he can beat the world of women. And SO
he can.-Home Queen.