Lewis Hough

“ The table rapped out that Alice alone was to leave.
“I wonder she likth to go to bed and be alone, if she is afraid of the gothth,” observed Ormond.
“Hush!” cried my uncle.
“Me-ow,” squealed the Banshee, amid renewed scratching and knocking; and then my uncle commenced an inquisition into the affairs of the Family Bogy.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“The spirit who appears at intervals in the form of a black cat.” ”

“ Alas, alas, I can give him none; the cheeky man, like the poet, is born, not made; he springs into the world like Minerva, armed in a panoply of brass. For him are reserved the front seats and liver wings of life; he shoots the game and rides the hunters of his neighbour, and travels in cabs for the legitimate fare. ”

“ Look at the diffident man: contemporaries who have not half his abilities pass him in the race of life; his jokes, which always fall flat, excite roars of laughter when picked up by some cheek-possessor, and retailed as his own. Any suggestion he may make relative to the trifling affairs of daily life is mostly pooh-poohed, but if tried and found to answer, is accredited to someone else, generally to the person who, in the first instance, most vehemently opposed him. ”

“ If you refuse her—whether from inability or not to grant her request does not matter a straw—she is your personal enemy from that day forth; if, on the contrary, you grant her request, do not look for gratitude, women are I hardly ever grateful to strangers. But if ever you want anything for which people you know nothing about are to be canvassed, whether it be a seat in parliament, or admission into an alms-house, it is to your lady friends you must apply. ”

“ And there entered a tall, powerful man, with long black hair, black beard, black whiskers, black moustache. He wore a ring on his fore-finger and another on his thumb; and when I first saw him I started, but, catching Alice’s eye on me, recovered myself.
“Ow you does, ladies and gentlemants?” said Herr Fritzjok, bowing all round. “You wish durns de dables? You speaks Deutsch, sir?”
“I speak Dutch! Not I,” cried Ormond. ”

“ Two hours after the emigrant arrived with all his goods and chattels, and wanted to take immediate possession of—the regimental prison.
But let it not be supposed that this valuable gift of “cheek” is monopolised by the ruder sex; the fair are endowed with it to at least an equal extent, and in their case it is generally combined with a naïveté which to my mind is peculiarly delightful. The calm way in which a lady will ask an utter stranger to give himself an infinity of trouble for her, or, more frequently, for those in whom she is interested, often excites my envious admiration. ”

“ Long contact with the world, and much practice have developed the natural hardihood of most of my heroes; but Robert Murtough was born perfect. He was only nineteen, and had spent the greater part of his life in a secluded Irish district, but there was not a veteran in the British army more self-possessed than that ensign. It is true that his cheek was not so highly appreciated by others as by myself. ”

“ It seemed to me as if the man who should win such a Peri must be unlucky in everything else he undertook, seeing that all the happiness and good fortune which should have been eked out through his whole existence, must be exhausted to distil that drop of concentrated bliss. ”

“ On turning from the book-case he fancied that he saw the curtain which festooned over the window move, and when, to put an end to the dread which came over him, he advanced towards it, a black cat flew out at him, dashed through the open door and disappeared. My grandfather died that night, and this confirmation of the family legend impressed my uncle with a taste for the supernatural, which has clung to him through life. My aunt was a moral chamelion, coloured by her husband, and sharing all his tastes, opinions, prejudices, and beliefs. ”

“ When I see one enter a drawing-room full of strange ladies, sitting bolt upright round the walls, who, quite unembarrassed about what to do with his hands, can lay himself alongside a couple of beauties, and commence firing small talk into them; when I hear a man at a public dinner composedly and smilingly talk utter nonsense, about a subject upon which he is perfectly ignorant, for an hour together ”

“ What could the poor man do? He could hardly give her into custody, and no one could come in or out of the house without brushing past this guardian of the threshold, dressed in the height of fashion, her parasol up, and an admiring crowd around her. I doubt if even Murtough could have done that.
Nougaret, in his collection of anecdotes, tells a story which shows that French ladies have at least as much “cheek” as their English sisters. ”

“ It is rude to tell people that they are not telling the truth, or that they have been humbugged, when they recount their experiences on the subject; but still I own that the idea of my soul becoming eventually part of the stock-in-trade of a Yankee conjuror does not coincide with my views of immortality, and would not tend to rob the grave of its terrors, and so I hope that I may be excused for being hard to convince. ”

“ He is thought by his intimate friends to be utterly devoid of taste and judgment on points upon which they have, unconsciously, adopted his opinions. As for tangible and pecuniary advantages, the cheeky carry them away from under one’s very nose. When poor Boxall gave up life and office together a short time ago, it occurred to me that the place he had vacated was the right place—salary high, work light—and that I was the right man. ”

“ A few years back I was staying at a dull seaside barrack town, to see the last of a friend who was under orders for a land where human beings were much in the position of pigeons at the Red House, and their lives held in little greater estimation than those of the blue rocks, and there I made the acquaintance of a young fellow who attained my beau ideal. ”

“ Poor Murtough; I lost sight of him after a few days, but I heard that shortly afterwards, having had some money left him, he exchanged into a light cavalry corps, where, the first time he was on stable duty he astonished the colonel of the crackest of all crack regiments by shouting to the men:
“Now then, there; don’t you see the colonel is coming? Be smarter; one would think you were a lot of yeomanry!” And a short time after that he narrowly escaped being tried by court-martial for charging with his troop right through a foot regiment at a review. ”

“ Then the fore paws being entirely used for catching the swallows, after a few generations turned to hands, and so the cats eventually became monkeys, the transition from which animal to the Morion family is obvious.”
“I don’t see it!” murmured my uncle.
“The monkeys,” the table rapped on, “migrated to a country where they were fed upon by a tribe of wolves, who, as they sprang into the trees, caught them by the tail, and so, those monkeys with the shortest tails having the best chance of life, a species was formed without any tails at all. ”

“ There was a station within a mile of Morion Parvus, the railway having passed through a portion of my uncle’s estate, much to his lamentation and wrath. To this day he considers himself as having been irreparably injured by the innovation, though there are people who would not mind how much of that sort of injustice was done them. ”

“ I do not know how it is, perhaps we Morions are of Irish extraction, for I believe the Banshee to be a Paddy; but, however that may be, our fortunes are mysteriously bound up with those of a black cat. Whenever any calamity is about to happen to the head of the family, pussy is sure to make her appearance with dilated eyes and electric tail. ”

“ What on earth could be the matter? Had What’s-his-name, after taking Herr Fritzjok for a whet, come back for the rest of the household? As I had rung my bed-room bell, I now rang that of the dining-room, with a similar lack of results; there was nothing for it but to explore. The hall-door was wide open, and my uncle’s hat and great coat were not on the pegs. Next I tried the stables, but the stalls were empty and the grooms gone. In the kitchen, however, I found a housemaid, with her arms on the dresser and her head on her arms, sobbing like a whipped child. ”

“ Morion announced that he wished to enter upon a more serious subject than had yet been broached.
“There is a solemn, an awful phenomenon attached to our family, and to which I myself have been a witness,” said he. “Before any great calamity, a spirit, in the form of a black cat, appears to one of us. I should like to know what spirit that is, and why it takes that shape.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth, than we heard a scratching mixed with the knocking under the table, and a most distinct Me-ow was audible in one corner of the room. Ventriloquism? ”

“ And yet how very, very seldom one meets with a ventriloquist; what a rare power his is. Why I, who have made the subject a study, have never met with more than one amateur ventriloquist capable of executing that Me-ow, and that was a Crichton of a friend of mine in the Engineers, who could do everything and anything but make his whiskers and moustache grow, and that he never could accomplish. ”

“ It is rayther a nuisance to have to get marwid so young; in justice to oneself one ought not to do it before forty; but you see I shall come to the title some day, and so my people baw me, and as I hate to be bawed, I am going to sacwifice myself. ”

“ A German gentleman, endowed with the power of corresponding with those spiritual beings whom with all our endeavours we have never been able to summon, is now staying in the neighbourhood, and it having been supernaturally intimated to him that I was desirous of communicating with the Unseen World, he has kindly offered to hold a séance here this evening at eight o’clock. ”

“ And I hinted something of the thort to old Morion at the club, and he of course was awfully glad, and asked me to come and thtay, but said that Alice was rather a self-willed sort of girl, and would set her face against the match if I was asked down on purpose to pwopose, so he said I had better come down in a chance sort of way as your friend: so Williams shall call and tell you the train I am going by. ”

“ So that those of our children, who could stand on their hind legs best, got most swallows, while those who could not do it at all died of starvation. Thus a race of cats arose walking on their hind legs. ”

“ My aunt gave Ormond a reception which was an acted charade very easy to guess. She did not say “You are a very fine fellow, well-born, rich, in all human probability the future possessor of a title, and a first-rate match for my daughter. Baiting with Alice we have hooked you, but such delicate fish have fine mouths, and I am dreadfully afraid lest you should break away after all ”