It was a week ago Monday that a lady from Oshkosh was at Watertown on a visit, and she wore a black silk dress with a red strip on the bottom.  As she walked across the bridge Mr. Calvin Cheeney, a gentleman whose heart is in the right place, saw what he supposed would soon be a terrible accident, which would tend to embarrass the lady, so he stepped up to her in the politest manner possible, took off his hat and said: 

“Excuse me, madame, but I think your wearing apparel is becoming disarranged.  You might step right into Clark’s, here, and fix it,” and he pointed to the bottom of her dress.

She gave him a look which froze his blood, and shaking her dress out she went on.  He said it was the last time he would ever try to help a woman in distress.

She sailed along down to a grocery store and stopped to look at some grapes, when the practiced eye of Hon. Peter Brook saw that something was wrong.  To think is to act with Peter, and he at once said: 

“Miss, your petticoat seems to be dropping off.  You can go in the store and get behind that box of codfish and fix it if you want to.”

Now that was a kind thing for Peter to do, and an act that any gentleman might be proud of, but he was amazed at her when she told him to mind his own business, and she would attend to her own petticoat, and she marched off just a trifle mad.

She went into the postoffice to mail a postal card, just as Mr. Moak, the postmaster, came out of his private office with Hon. L.B.  Caswell, the congressman.  Mr. Moak, without the aid of his glasses, saw that there was liable to be trouble, so he asked Caswell to excuse him a moment, and turning to the delivery window where she was asking the clerk what time the mail came in, he said: 

“I beg a thousand pardons, madame.  It ill becomes a stranger to speak to one so fair without an introduction, but I believe that I am not violating the civil service rules laid down by Mr. Hayes for the guidance of postmasters when I tell you, lady, that something has broke loose and that the red garment that you fain would hide from the gaze of the world has asserted itself and appears to the naked eye about two chains and three links below your dress.  I am going abroad, to visit Joe Lindon, the independent candidate for sheriff, and you can step into the back office and take a reef in it.”

He did not see the look of fire in her eyes as he went out, because he was not looking at her eye.  She passed out, and Doc Spaulding, who has got a heart in him as big as a box car, saw it, and touching his broad brimmed felt hat he said, in a whisper: 

“Madame, you better drop into a millinery store and fasten up your—­”

But she passed him on a run, and was just going into a hardware store, with her hand on her pistol pocket, when Jule Keyes happened along.  Now, Jule would consider himself a horse thief if he should allow a woman to go along the street with anything the matter with her clothes, and he not warn her of the consequences, so he stopped and told her that she must excuse him, a perfect stranger, for mentioning her petticoat, but the fact was that it was coming off.