WHAT IS TUCKING ?

Thames Star, Volume IX, Issue 3030, 31 October 1878, Page 4

WHAT IS TUCKING ?

An Anxious Inqtjibeb and an Ibate

Kditob.

A bothered looking citizen came into the Gazette office yesterday afternoon and respectfully asked to. be let look at the dictionary. He sat down and anxiously thumbed Webster awhile. " What are you looking for ?", asked a reporter, seeing that the stranger had failed to strike the trail. "Well," said the man, in a burst of confidence, " you see I've only been mar« ried a short time, and my wife's gone up to Truckee on a visit, and she's written to me to look in the bottom of her trunk for a lot of 'tucking' and send it to her. Now, what I want to know is what in blazes is ' tucking ? ' " Tucking ? " said the reporter, briskly, " why, tucking is the stuff the girls make by poking a sort of short turned fishhook through a hole, and catching the thread and drawing it back again." ' Then the editor spoke up contemptuously and said that a man who was so ignorant as that ought to hold his tongue. What the reporter had described was crocheting. Everybody ought to know what tucking was. The ladies in making it used a little contrivance shaped like a mussel, with thread wound up. inside of it. Tucking could be purchased, he believed, for ten or fifteen cents a yard, and why intelligent girls should waste a whole day in making what they could get for a short bit was. more than he could understand. In answer to a question from the admiring reporter, the editor said that he had been told that tucking was used in trimming the under garments of the fair sex, but why things should be ornamented ■ which a fellow would get licked for trying to look at—or perhaps shot—was beyond his comprehension. The married stranger said the editor was mistaken. That the article he mentioned was not tucking—it was tatting. This he knew for a fact. The editor observed that when a man came to the Gazette office for information, the editor, when he gave it, did'nt like to be told that he lied. If the stranger wanted to avoid trouble he had better get out and go to the devil. As the editor had grown red in the face and his eyes were blazing, the married stranger coughed feebly and slunk down stairs. In the meantime, what is "tucking?" , —American Paper. j