Dyed

At Laporte City, Iowa, one Albert Cole, cobbler-music teacher, dyed a pair of his own oxfords with an analine tint last week and at once took so long a walk that his feet perspired. Soon he developed a dizzy headache and felt sleepy. Local doctors found him dying, his entire body tinted a "brilliant blue, as though it had been painted." The theory was that the shoe dye had colored him so. Really, the aniline in the dye had fixed itself onto the red corpuscles of the man's blood, as does carbon monoxide gas from motor car exhausts, and prevented his blood oxygenating itself. He was blue because he was cyanosed. (This is an occasional accident of dyed shoes.)