Daily Yellowstone Journal

Sunday, November 18, 1883,

A HEAVEN-BORN THOUGHT

It goes without saying that the great Yankee nation stands many lengths to the fore of all other people in the matter of mechanical inventions, and that manual labor has been enormously reduced, and grand results attained, by the inventive skill of the American. The cotton gin, the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, and hundreds of other labor and time-saving inventions, stand to-day as enduring monuments to the fame and ability of the American mind, and make the commonplace record of current events read like a chapter from the Arabian Nights. But, while the class of inventions here referred to relate only to economy in time and money, what shall be said of a device that is to do away with the blasphemy and profanity that is now, every year, launched on the autumn breezes, to which belching forth of such hurid fumes is mainly attributable the hazy appearance of our Indian-summer atmosphere. This contrivance, known to the mercantile world by the prosaic title of "a device for fitting stove-pipes," but which we should dignify by the appellation of "A device for more completely repelling the assaults of the devil, and the ultimate christianizing of the world," is, as its humble inventor discloses, a sure and certain method of rendering a refractory stove-pipe subservient to the will of mankind, and thus placing the devil and all his hosts at a disadvantage to which they have never before been subjected. By its use any child can in a few moments fit together two or more joints of stove-pipe, no matter how rusty, sawed up or imbued with a devilish spirit of resistance there may be. The mode by which it is done, it is not the province of this article to explain. Suffice it to say that it can be done, and with this knowledge entertained in the consciousness of suffering humanity—whose fingers, thumbs and eternal souls have alike been marred and seared out of all semblance of heaven-given purities, by yearly contests with Satan, embodied in a rebellious and self-willed stove pipe—thanksgiving so pure and heartfelt will this morning be mingled with the prayers of all, that all aureole of glory will encircle the whole world, and our distant relatives in the moon and other orbs correlative to this system of ours, who know not yet of the snares of the malevolent stove pipe, will look at this dear old Earth of ours and wonder what is up.