THE FUNNY HALF-HOUR.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 284, 17 September 1886, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE FUNNY HALF-HOUR.

By Silas Snell,

KISSING. • We have noticed a tendency of the times is to gather a cloud of doubt and fear about the kiss. Envious age, from whose lips the magnetic thrill has faded and fled, climbs on to a chair and informs heedless youth that osculation is spreading fever and decay through the land. Bad drainage and crowded neighborhoods are unhealthy, but they are salubrity itself when compared with the touch of lips, A well-known woman’s rights lecturess and local social reformer generally has spoken against the sweet act. She says that disease and death lurk in the buss, and it ought to be permanently abandoned by the nations of the earth. This is much to be deplored. The kiss is one of the most popular pastimes of the people ; it has descended to us from our fathers, and, after ages of practice, we have it to-day in a high state of perfection. It has become ingrafted into our natures. It is an instinct, The young man who hastens with eager feet to meet his fond love under the willows in the gloaming may have his mind full of bull-dogs, and snaptraps, and iron-clad boots, but his first act is to clasp her to his bosom and plant a kiss just where it is best off. It is not an act of will, it is mechanical. Do not blame the youth; the blame rests entirely upon his automatic nerve arcs, and the rude parent who kicks that youth or lets off a watch-dog at him is perpetrating an act of cruelty which should be rewarded with the lash. We have always deemed the kiss a healthy and cheap entertainment. We have done much of kissing in our time, and are now

enjoying a hale old age. No thoughts of fumigating the ripe lips, pursed to receive our tender salute, ever entered our mind, and we boldly declare that even now, when our constitution is rendered by extreme age more susceptible to the subtle attacks of malaria, we would kiss fifteen pretty young women before dinner ; let them come on, Young men of Victoria, accept those didactic meanings in the same spirit: reverence the customs of your fathers. When a pretty, dimple - cheeked, sunny face is nestling against your vest, and the bright eyes are looking up rogueishly into your own, don’t let ghastly thoughts deter you. Chance it, and if any antiquated fossil comes along to tell you the risk you run, show him your vaccination marks and say you came prepared. These tirades against an innocent pleasure only furnish the rough-shod paternal progenitor with another excuse to slink out and kick an unoffending youth from his front garden into the next street. The old time plea that the blanked dude was trampling down his choicest plants never seemed effective enough for the occasion, but now, when the pugnacious parent glides upon Matilda’s young man just as he is bidding her adieu for the eleventh time, and beats him. with an axe-handle, or throws him over the gate, he can always explain to the enquiring neighbors in a plausible way by saying : “ I lobbed on that fair rascal innoculating my Tilly with consumption,‘dyphtheria, typhoid, and a whole hospital full of noxious disorders, so I heaved him out.” This is the most hopeless reform that has been mooted this century. Sinful men may yet be cast from our Legislative bodies; Sunday trains may cease from troubling, and their drivers be at rest; but the kiss will

flourish. Woman may wear M.P. after her name, and orate excitedly before the House on prosy bills, move amendments, and table motions ; she may step into our nether habiliments, and cross-question us at the bar of justice with a head crammed full of dry law and complex arguments, and adorned with a horse-hair wig ; she may even build a chimney and drive nails without splitting her thumb, but she’ll always be kissed. The kiss will never be eradicated while men and women love. It will go on spreading disease and death through the ’land if that is its little failing.