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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 3 (July 1, 1930)

The Cold Jiggers

The Cold Jiggers.

But, dear reader, in addition to those well-known indoor winter sports, tossing the coalscuttle, rolling the eiderdown, whipping the cat, and keeping the funny side up, winter has hatched a horde of cold jiggers, a band of human igloos, to whom snow is the ambrosial ambergris, and ice an incentive to physical violence. When the mercury has sunk a foot below Plimsoll, and the mountain goat has gone into cold storage, these snow-bawlers lope over the wind-swept slopes in packs; they climb the highest mountains armed with yodels, “eidelwhizzers,” and slabs of Swiss cheese, and slide down per medium of their ulterior motives. They lash scantlings to their understandings and slither over the face of nature like a poached egg in a porcelain tub, unless, of course, one leg claims that east is west and the other essays a solo flight, where-upon they part at the cross-roads and precipitate their proprietor into the great white south.

When the frisky freezers aforesaid feel that southerly storms and the other cold confections of the lower levels have become too enervating for their concrete constitutions, they grab a pickaxe and a horse-hair shirt and head for the ice-cream cones and snow-slides preserved for the purpose of keeping them comfortably cold. And, astonished reader, they wallow in their altitudinisms, and have been known to shed hailstones when, with the melting of the big snows, they have been forced to return to the horizontal haunts of humanity. But doubtless, dear reader, were these snow-eaters requested to disinter a tub of tubers from the kitchen garden during a blizzard they would create a frosty atmosphere in the domiciliary wigwam.