gs 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.

BOYS AND CIRCUSES.

There is one thing the American people have got to learn, and that is to
give scholars in schools a half holiday when there is a circus in town.
We know that we are in advance of many of the prominent educators of the
country when we advocate such a policy, but sooner or later the people
whose duty it is to superintend schools will learn that we are right,
and they will have to catch up with us or resign.

In the first place, a boy is going to attend a circus, if there is one
in town, and the question before teachers and superintendents should
be, not how to prevent him from going to the circus, but how to keep
his mind on his books the day before the circus and the day after.
There have been several million boys made into liars by school officials
attempting t