THE DANGEROUS HAMMOCK.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2741, 5 January 1882, Page 2

THE DANGEROUS HAMMOCK.

A young couple who were sitting in a hammock at one of the watering places in this State were severely injured by tipping over backwards and striking on the cheek of a bead waiter. There is something about a hammock that is indescribable, and there is no rule that can be made that will ensure safety while sitting in one of the queer things. There are people who believe that a hammock understands what is going on, and occasionally indulges in a joke. It is certain that an old person with a lame back can swing in a hammock half the day and it will never kick up. Servant girls and children can get into a hammock as thick as three in a bed and there is no danger, but let a spooney young couple sit down in a hammock ever so carefully and it seems as though the confounded thing were alive, and bad taken a contract to spill them out on tho ground in all sorts of shapes. What it is that causes the commotion will perhaps never be known, without an investigation by some middle-aged person, and if the season were not so near over we would investigate the blasted thing ourselves in the interest of our young readers who are in full flush of hammockhood. There can be nothing much more annoying to a youngcouple than to be sitting in a hammock looking into each other’s eyes, and allowing the love they dare not speak to show itself in their orbs, and just as they are feeling as if they couldn’t live a minute longer unless they clasped each other to each other’s heaving bosom, or at least one heaving bosom and one boiled shirt, and then have tho hammock turn bottom sido up and land them on the backs of their necks on the ground, with arms flinging wildly, and hands convulsively clawing gravel, and muslin and delaine,;while blushes suffuse

faces that but a moment before were background for the picture of love’s young dream,, and a crowd of spectators on the hotel verandah laughing and saying. “ Set ’em up again,” the hammock shakes itself and turns right side up for other victims, as though it knew what it had been doing and enjoyed it. There are young men all over the land who have been through such experiences and had to walk backwards all the way to the house, owing to fissure veins being discovered in the wearing apparel below the suspenders, while the number of girls that have been mortified by having to go the house with their back hair in one hand, their skirt in the other, while six places between the polonaise and the ear rings were aching like the toothache from contact with the gravel path, are legion, and we call upon the authorities to suppress the hammock nuisance. More matches have been broken up by hammocks than by all- the Sunday schools in the world, and no girl that has an ancle like a rutabaga should ever trust herself in a hammock, even though it is held by half a dozen friends, as the hammock will shy at a piece of paper as quick as a skittish horse, and in such a moment as ye think not you are on all fours, your head dizzy, and if there is a bole in your stocking as small as the Democrat’s hope of election, it will look to outsiders as big as the gate to a fair ground. Oh, a hammock is worse than a bicycle.—Milwaukee “ Sun.”