Puck — September 12, 1877 — page 5: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

We (Feminine). THE FELINE EXASPERATOR. | will overcome cats, they retired toa far-distant ee iE was a Saturday evening when, in the calm light of the setting sun, he emerged from his back-door with a claw-hammer, four nails and a yard of cat-teaser. He stood up ona kitchen chair, and fastened the spiked tin on the top of the fence with demoniac reso- | lution and the before-mentioned hammer. ‘Then he wiped the perspiration from the top of his bald head, and retired into the house, wearing an air of profound satisfaction. ‘Then he ensconced himself in the dining- room window, and waited. Now, there was no shadow of reason for his | putting down that cat-teaser. The cats in the neighborhood were all a quiet, subdued, rather melancholy class of cats. ‘They were not in any way uproarious cats, or dissolute cats, or cats of ill-regulated minds, with vicious traits of character. ‘They had their griefs, no doubt, their private troubles and their family dissen- sions, but they were not cats given to making these things public. No doubt they had the weaknesses of all | roof, and eschewed the hazardous fence. They felt that when the delicate chords of the soul vibrated with the subtle passion that | shrunk from the glaring eye of day, bootjacks were a disturbing influence. A cat on the fence, when it uses that fence | simply as a thoroughfare, and in no way as a | trysting-place, cannot be regarded, even by | the most censorious, asa nuisance. ‘The action of the gentleman with the bald head was, there- fore, entirely unprovoked. in his fiendish intent. All that evening he watched; and when the | | golden stars twinkled in the azure empyrean, he was still sitting at his post. But no cat ap- peared upon the fence. The next day he watched all the morning, and his pew in church was vacant. He felt himself justified the feline question was settled. About noon he ventured out again, and this time, impressed perhaps with the idea that the cat-teaser was something like fly-paper, he shifted the position of the tin, and then went back again and resumed his tireless watch. Ere long his vigilance was rewarded A large cat-—a yellow cat --a cat with a green eye and a crooked tail—a cat at whom it would have been a positive pleasure to fling something —came ambling placidly along the fence. ‘The man with the bald head drew a long ; breath, and crouched behind the window cur- tains. His hour had come. ‘The cat advanced, slowly, calmly, unsus- pectingly. He pictured to himself her approaching fate. He thought of her agonized astonishment—her frantic struggles to get beyond the obstacle— he saw in fancy her arched back, and her di- | lated optics—he could almost sec her rolling | into the yard, limp and unnerved, a feline wreck. It was well that he took his circus out in imagination just when he did. The cat marched forward with measured step, But he quailed not | easing off on religion until | He caught his breath, and tried to still the | pulsations of his throbbing heart. ‘The cat put down another foot—then another —and another. She was standing square on the teaser. For one moment she paused. ‘Then she began to sit down. She lifted first one hind-leg and then the other, and thus sce-sawed for about a minute. And then she settled down with look of placi- dity and contentment such as only a cat can sport; and only a cat, at that, who feels a plea- sant titillation—and an agreeable irritation, as it were a region more accustomed to old boots and hair-brushes. Then she began to purr. And when the bald-headed man heard that, he rose up, and flung himself out the window, and rolled around on the grass in that respect- able back-yard, and tore at the place where his hair might have been, and said that his life | was a blighted waste, and called down the vengeance of the eternal furies upon the man who invented the cat-teaser. And he remarked, as he rooted up a sod, and threw it wide off the fence, that he didn’t believe Science was marching on for a cent, either. “T po not mind,” said the editor of the Lon- don comic weekly, as his contributor timor- ously brought in a paragraph about Russia not | being the Boss for us, ‘I do not mind a little | enterprise and liberality in these jokes; but I | think, Mr. Smith, that you're getting a little too extravagant, and American, and premature, as it were, in your style of humor.” You never hear of breach-of-promise suits on the part of our American watering-places belles | against the brilliant young scions of the British nobility who flit like wanton butterflies through Saratoga and Long Branch. This is partly be- cause the young ladies are too dignified and high-toned to expose their blighted affections to the gaze of the world, and partly because the available assets of the noble Britons rarely go much beyond thirty-seven cents in cash and a sublunary creatures, but when the teniler in- | and planted one fore-foot tentatively on the paper-collar, fluence of the balmy night overcame them, asit ! teaser. es comicbooks.com