Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893

There are other animals which your true keeper holds in aversion. And chief amongst these is the domestic cat. You might as well try to keep a journalist from his writing-paper as country cats from the coverts. They are inveterate and determined poachers, and, alas, they meet with scant mercy from the keeper if he catches them. Many a fireside tabby or tortoise-shell dies a violent death in the course of every year, and is buried in a secret grave. This often gives rise to disturbance, for the cottager, to whom the deceased was as the apple of her eye, may make complaint of the keeper to his master. My friend SYKES, one of the best keepers I know, once related to me an incident of this nature. As it may help to explain the nature of keepers, and throw light on the conversational method to be adopted with them, I here set down the winged words in which SYKES addressed me.

"Trouble, Sir? I believe you. Them old women gives me a peck o' trouble, far more nor the breakin' of a retriever dog. There's old Mrs. PADSTOW, Mother PADDS we call 'er, she's a rare old teaser. Went up to Mr. CHALMERS last week and told 'im I'd shot 'er pet cat. Mr. CHALMERS, 'e spoke to me about it; said I'd better go and make it right with the old gal. So, yesterday I goes to call upon 'er. First we passed the time o' day together, and then we got to business. You see, Sir, me and the old lady had always been friendly, so I took it on the friendly line. 'Look 'ere,' I says, 'Mrs. PADSTOW, I've come about a cat.' 'Ah,' she says. 'It's just this way,' I says, 'Mr. CHALMERS tells me you said I'd shot your cat. Now,' I says, straightenin' myself up and lookin' proud, 'I couldn't scarcely believe that, and you and me such good friends, so I've just come to ask you if you did say that. She was a bit took aback at this, so I asked 'er again. 'Well,' she says, 'I didn't exactly say that.' 'What did you say then?' I asked her. 'I told Mr. CHALMERS,' she says, 'that our old cat 'ad been shot what never did no 'arm, and I thought it might be as you'd a done it, p'raps not meanin' it.' 'Ah,' I says, 'them was your words, was they?' 'Yes,' she says, 'them was my words.' 'Well, then,' I says, 'you'd better be careful what you say next time, or you don't know whose character you'll be takin' away next.' And with that I left 'er."

"But did you shoot the cat, SYKES?" I ventured to ask.

"_Did_ I shoot it? Ho, ho, ha, ha! What do you think! Sir?"

And with that enigmatic answer the dialogue closed.

When referring to a recent Lecture by a certain Noble Marquis (distinguished in the "_P.R._-age" of the Realm), the ladies generally say, that they should decidedly object to be married "under the Queensberry Rules." Their prize ring is quite another affair.

"DOWN AMONG THE COALS."--The most appropriate place wherein to try "the scuttle" policy would, of course, be--Newcastle.

The vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsion--heaving, boiling, hissing,--gryrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.

Precipitous descents! Niagara's abrupt and headlong plunge is but as an eddy in a rocky trout-stream compared with what was soon to be seen here. In brief space there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools one by one disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly--very suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite existence in a circle of a colossal and seemingly all-embracing diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming, turbid slime--cumbered spray, foul, festering, furiously troubled, slipping, as it seemed, particle by particle, viscid gout by gout, into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round, with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if only one has the courage to attempt it. In fact, it is made a matter of desperate speculation--risk standing instead of labour, and courage, of a reckless, and not too scrupulous sort, answering for capital. But there are many who would lightly adventure the pestilential perils of a tropic stream, or fever-haunted water-way or canal, who would yet shrink from being caught--owing to want of care, and cautious calculation as to the exact hours of slack and safety--by the hideous, irresistible, all-engulfing, all-wrecking whirl of the terrifying Stroem! Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!

Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe, horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once within that whirl, gaze about him!--for he has leisure to observe. The downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling water-walls is comparatively slow. The victim clinging to his boat, or bound to his spar or barrel, appears to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might be mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spin around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shoot forth, a foul, phosphorescent iridescence, as of accumulated corruption, streaming in a flood of loathsome radiance along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost mist--veiled recesses of the abyss!

Looking about upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which that helpless, past-struggling, beautiful, and apparently doomed figure was borne, I perceived that she, in the midst of the mighty, all-mastering misery, was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below were visible fragments of wreckage--significant wreckage--plumed hats, sword-sheaths, portfolios, epaulettes, decorations, insignia of honour, as if here a national Argosy, laden with Opulence, Rank Intelligence, and Honour, had gone, dismally and desperately, down to--_what_? Let those Phlegethon walls, that Tophet-like mist, make answer!