The Office Towel

Feilding Star, Volume VIII, Issue 69, 11 December 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

The Office Towel

Often I think of the old printing office towel. It was a beautiful towel to gaze upon when it was fresh and clean on Monday morning, for it was a yard wide, and sweet as a lily. But by Monday evening it had the devil's finger-marks on it, and they were more plainly impressed than any footsteps that were ever made on the sands of Time, On Mondayit was fit to wipe your face on for fifteen minutes after being^ put up. On Tuesday it was a hand-towel —that is, it would clean a printer's hands, and soil anyone else's. On Wednesday it would put a patent-leather shine on a pair of brown leather shoes. And then it got thin, too, and it kept getting thin until it almost looked like a shoe string. On Thursday a compositer with D. T. took it for a black snake, and, rushing for the stairway, fell all. the way down over the devil who was coming up with an armful of pye wrapped in brown paper, and a pail of beer hanging on each finger. By Friday the towel was so black that you could run it over a galley and pull a proof On Saturday it was wrungoutinto the ink-bottle, and then used in the pressroom for belting-. On Saturday afternoon a compositor had a headache, and tied it around his head. Oxalic acid would not tak« the black off, and he had to dye his red hair black to escape ridicule. I Then a farmer bought it and took it home. He said some time after he had used it as a fertiliser, and had a splendid crop of flax and hickory snoots.