THE BOBKINS' THRESHER.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 277, 1 May 1875, Page 3

THE BOBKINS' THRESHER.

Bobkins is a grange r ; an inventive sort of a cuss he is, too. His ideas are lofty, none of your common one-horse notions run through his head, but a kind of four-in-hand set of ideas, that have to be held in with a curb-bit, or they'd get away from him, sure. Why, bless you, he'd chain the lightning to a patent churn, and put it through until it couldn't singe the hair on a dog's back ; or he'd harness a whirlwind to a rotary, back action, double-motion tan-bark mill, and work it down until it was as mild as a summer zephyr fawning a lover's brow ; and, as for the Mammoth Cave t and Niagra Falls, he just wanted them on his farm —the cave he'd have turned into a large dairy, and have the cows milked by machinery, run by the Falls, while the clatter of buz saws and rumbling of burs would have made a useful

member of society out of the Falls, instead of leading the lazy hum drum life they do, for the hotel proprietors' benefit. These things show the great mould in which Bobkins was cast; but the grand triumph of his genius reached its culmination when he invented " The Bobkins' Thresher " This thresher he had rigged up in his barn, and geared it up to a windmill. Now, this windmill was a genius in itself, and did nearly everything on the Bobkins farm, almost to carrying the children to school; and Bobkins used to say that it could stand up on the barn and shoot crows in the corn-field. However, he had reached his aspirations in that direction when lie rigged it on to the thresher; and it would make things hum you bet. When Bobkins got it all working just to his notion, his wife got up a quilting bee, and he invited all his neighbors in to see the thresher go through a pile of oats. Now, it seems that at just about time for the neighbors to gather in the proverbial " ill-wind that blows no-body good" sprang up, a regular old nor'wester, and it made that windmill howl like a hound under a barn-floor, and that thresher whizzed in a waj that Bobkins did not quite understand, so he thought he'd ease up the power a bit, and that's where he slipped up on it; and just as his neighbors got to the barn, that thresher reached for Bobkins and took him in, and had it all its own way. It got him by the ear, and slung him around until that ear stretched out like the band of a fly-wheel; then it changed off and picked him up by the leg, and made a spindle of his nose, and spun him around until he hummed like a schoolboy's top; then it beat oats with him for a while, and jabbed him down into a barrel of soap, and took him out and scrubbed the barn floor with his head ; then it took his clothes all off, just as though it was going to put him to bed, and stuffed him under the oats, and pulled him out again, just as Mrs Bobkins and the little Bobkins and the women came frame frantical by rushing into the barn; the women screamed, the children cried, and the men flew around trying to get Bobkins out ; but that thresher knew too much for them, and wasn't going to let up on him while there was any fun ahead. Bobkins wasn't asleep all this time, either; it was real lively for him, and, from the way he yelled, it was evident he took an interest in what was going on. At last a rope caught on the shaft of tke windmill, and took a tangle around Bobkins and pulled him away from the thresher, and hauled him up through the roof of the born, and the performance was over. Now, if you want to hear anything more about Bobkins, go down to the country store and talk to old ' Sawbone,' who has taken the contract to poultice up Bobkins and put a new hide on him.