GEORGE COATES.

We other eccentrics will resent having George Coates mixed with us, in an exact ratio with our similarity to him. The chap that is so near like Coates that he ought to be named Vests, will roar the loudest.

George lived in Cleveland when, as editor of The News, the author first sighted his mortal frame. It was on a calm and gentle autumn evening. Night was drawing her sable mantle round the world, and pinning it with a star. The sun had set behind a distant hogpen. The author was trying to convince a Clevelander that his hope and future fealty lay in subscribing for The News, when there came a strange buzzing down by an old worm fence. This was fol­lowed by a weird figure flopping and floundering through a cabbage patch, and coming straight for us.

"Here goes for Rock Island county," said the scribe, heading for Rock River.

"Come back, that's only George Coates," said the Clevelander. There was a powerful appeal in his words. I'd got his one dollar and fifty cents, and he hadn't the receipt.

I returned with the slow, measured tread of a man working by the day. "Buzz-zuzz-boo-whoo-z-z-z-z !" whined the man.

"This is Coates," said the Clevelander to me.

"Typographical error," said I, "should be called pants." "Whooe-buzz-whiz-zuzz," remarked Coates.

"What ails him?" I asked. I then presented the strange being with a copy of the Geneseo News.

Explanations followed. He was mad at the man I had been talking with be­cause he had not dug Coates' potatoes. "Tay-tees," George called them. George had made hay for the man, and the man had agreed to use his horsedigger on George's potato field. George had come home in the gathering dark, and found his field untouched. The reason George buzzed and whined was that he was too mad to articulate.

The tumult that ensued I have carried in my mind for a generation. The man tried to explain to George that he had been too busy—fish had bitten like mosquitoes that day. But George wouldn't have it. Both talked to me and at each other. They raved, they raged, they roared. George sounded like a con­vention of hornets. At last, when nearing collapse, they blew and blasted a reso: lution to leave it to the scribe.

The matter was then adjusted this way : George was to subscribe on the spot for The News, to put his spirit in the proper poise, and the other man was to dig the potatoes next morning.

Coates rigged up the most remarkable outfit ever beheld by mortal man, and went about the country with it. It was a workshop on a wagon. A big belt from one of the rear wheels drove all the machinery. A grindstone whirled, a buzz-saw buzzed, an auger bored, a planing machine moved. In the midst of all this commotion stood George, proud, triumphant. He would grind a farmer's axe and scythe while he paraded back and forth in the lane fronting the farmhouse, for the machinery wouldn't go unless the wagon went. Two mules drew the outfit and usually three were led in the rear for emergencies. Of late years George has made Moline his habitat, being attracted thither by his fondness for machinery.

History of Henry County

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