A MEAN TRICK.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4591, 22 August 1923, Page 1

A MEAN TRICK.

A DISGUSTED WATERSIDE®. STOLE HIS LAWN-MOWER. A good story, a gem of its kind, is being told in Lyttelton, ft concerns a waterside worker, who, having successfully sown a lawn in front of his house, found that a lawn-mower would be his next item of expenditure, unless other means were found of procuring one. He decided to adopt the cheaper, if less honest means, and hided hi,s time. One day his chance came; a steamer was discharging hardware and in the hold which the watersider was working were cases of particularly attractive looking mowers (states the Lyttelton Times). The next problem was how to get one ashore. A lawn-mower obviously cannot be carried in a pocket or under a man’s singlet, like a few plugs of tobacco or packets of cigarettes, and the ever vigilant Customs watchmen are always suspicious of any appearance of bulkiness of cl.othes. This was a matter that required thought and patience, so the watersider carefully took one machine to pieces to get it ashore a little at a time, sometimes a wheel in his pocket, and, next time, perhaps, the blades in a parcel of broken dunnage which the companies usually permit to be taken home for firing. The handle he had to saw in .two, and this also came ashore as dunnage. The work of transportation was completed on a Friday night., On the Saturday afternoon the watersider assembled the machine apd mowed his lawn — and on the Saturday night someone stole it, out of his shed, and he has not. seen it since. It is said that after exhausting every epithet that he could think of, and. threatening all kinds of personal injury to imaginary culprits, the watersider is at last reconciled to the joke, and the plot is now used for vegetables.