A friend was explaining why he was in the hospital. He said his wife had brought a bunch of potted plants and hanging baskets into the house to keep them from freezing, and it happened that a little green snake had hidden himself in one of these plants. When the snake warmed up, it came slithering out of the plant and went under the sofa. The fellow's wife saw it and let out a great scream. He happened to be taking a bath at the time, but he leaped out of the tub and ran naked to see what his wife was screaming about. His wife told him a snake was under the sofa, so he got down on the floor to look for it and here came his dog and cold-nosed him. Well, he thought it was the snake and he fainted. His wife thought he had a heart attack and called an ambulance. The attendants rushed in and loaded him on the stretcher and started carrying him out. About the same time, the snake came slithering out from under the sofa and the ambulance man saw it and dropped the stretcher and broke the fellow's leg and that's why he was in the hospital.

Well, with her husband in the hospital with a broken leg and a snake under her couch, the wife went next door to enlist the aid of a neighbor who had the reputation of being an outdoors man (because he camped out with the Cub Scouts last summer). Armed with a rolled up newspaper, he took a few swishes under the couch and declared that the snake had probably left the premises.

"Thank goodness," sighed the woman, plopping down on the couch. As her hand dropped between the cushions, it brushed a small scaly skin, which she immediately realized was the snake. Screaming, she fainted dead away on the sofa as the snake slithered quickly back to the floor underneath the couch.

Realizing that something needed to be done, the great hunter drew upon his meager first aid skills and remembered a demonstration of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation he had seen.

So he pushed the woman's head into the proper position and just as he started the first breath, in ran his wife with a sack full of canned goods after hearing her neighbor's scream.

Seeing her husband mouth-to-mouth with the neighbor woman on the couch, she immediately slammed the sack full of canned goods across the top of his head.

The crash, and scattering cans, brought the fainted woman up with a start. When she saw the man lying on the floor, and his wife bending over him, she was sure he had been bitten by the snake so she ran to the kitchen and brought out a small bottle of brandy, which she began to pour down the fellow's throat. His wife, beginning to regret hitting him with a sack, was subdued but did manage to wrestle the bottle away from the well-meaning woman, sloshing some on both of them in the process. About that time, two policemen, summoned by a neighbor who had heard the screams and all the other commotion, walked in. After a sniff of the brandy aroma from the man and both women, the officers listened politely as the two women, both talking at the same time, explained how a snake caused it all.

The policemen left with a summoned ambulance, containing the unconscious husband and his sobbing wife, which took them away to the hospital, leaving the first woman completely unbalanced with a very small and scared snake hidden under the sofa.