Geo. W. Peck, of Peck's _Sun_, knows more about the harmful hammock,
both by experience and observation, than any other man in America. His
testimony runs as follows:
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 head waiter. There is something about
a hammock that is indescribable, and there is no rule that can be made
that will insure 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 in a hammock as thick as three in a bed and there is no danger, but
let a spoony young couple sit down in a hammock ever so carefully and it
seems as though the confounded thing was alive, and had taken a contract
to spill them out on the ground in all sorts of embarrassing 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
was not so near over we would investigate the blasted thing ourself,
in the interest of our young readers who are in the full blush of
hammockhood.
There can be nothing much more annoying to a young couple than to be
sitting side by side or facing each other in a hammock, looking into
each other's eyes, and allowing the love they dare not speak to show
itself in those orbs, and just as they are feeling as though they
couldn't live a minute unless they clasped each other to each other's
heaving bosoms, or at least one heaving bosom and one boiled shirt, and
then have the hammock turn bottom side up and land them on the back of
their necks, on the ground, with legs pointed towards the crab apples on
the trees to which the hammock is hitched, arms flinging wildly to pull
down pantaloon legs, and hands convulsively clawing gravel and muslin
and delaine, while blushes suffuse faces that but a moment before were
a 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 to the house with their back hair in one hand, their skirts 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 as a nuisance.
More matches have been broken up by hammocks than by all the Sunday
schools in the world, and no girl who is bow-legged, or has an ankle
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 hole in your
stocking as small as a Democrat's hope of election, it will look to
outsiders as big as the gate to a fair ground. O, a hammock is worse
than a bicycle.