Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature"Loomis, Charles Battell
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Minerva's Manoeuvres: The Cheerful Facts of a "Return to Nature"
Loomis, Charles Battell
Country life -- Fiction; Household employees -- Fiction; Humorous stories; Married people -- Fiction; New England -- Fiction
“Hold on a minute,” I cried, rushing to her assistance, but just
as I reached her the chest slipped from her fingers.
But a cat with all its nine lives fresh within its young frame,
is not easily “squished,” even by so heavy a thing as a chest
full of magazines, and Miss Pussy’s body darted out just in
time. Not so the tip of her tail which, whisking behind her as
she turned to rush out, was caught between chest and floor, and
acted like a push button on a call bell, for she emitted a
continuous yawp that lasted until I had lifted the chest again.
Cats generally see where they are going, but Miss Pussy had been
looking behind her at the spectacle of her imprisoned tail, and
when I released her she sprang high in the air and landed
compactly and dexterously on a sheet of sticky fly paper.
Never can I forget the look she gave us over her shoulder as her
feet struck the gluey mass. To give herself a leverage by which
to pull her dainty fore-paws out of the entanglement, she sat
down—temporarily, as she thought—permanently, as the fly paper
decided.
We _were_ sorry for the cat, but being Americans we gave
ourselves over to mirth at the picture she presented. The pencil
of a Frost is needed to adequately represent her agonized
twisting on the sticky sheet. At last, by a Herculean effort,
she extricated her fore paws and walking glue-ily to the head of
the stairs she dragged herself along on the fly paper as if she
were part sled, part cat. Coming to the head of the stairs she
attempted to walk down in the manner of trick cats, but not
being used to the exercise she turned a series of summersaults
instead, and landed at the foot so completely enmeshed in sticky
fly paper that it would have been a small fly, indeed, who could
have found a place for his own little feet upon its yellow
surface.
I have often derided the witless persons who found amusement in
what I call pantomime catastrophes, but this simple conjunction
of cat and fly paper was as funny as anything I ever looked at.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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