Here lies Beethoven in his grave, No earthly power could him save; An envious cork blocked up his breath And that was how he met his death.
Piffles was a splendid pink Circassian--perfect in colour and shape, with glorious topaz eyes. But the extraordinary thing about him was a gift that he had for changing his colour. Thus my uncle, an old Anglo-Indian who always drank a bottle of Madeira after dinner, declared that from 10 P.M. onwards Piffles invariably seemed to him to be a bright crimson with green spots. Another peculiarity of Piffles was that he always followed the guns out shooting, and used to retrieve birds from the most difficult places. He practically ruled the household, took the boys back to school after the holidays, attended family prayers, and was learning to play the pianola when he was unfortunately killed by a crocodile which escaped from a travelling menagerie.
Last year I had a cat who, whenever she was offended, used to go to my bedroom and throw various articles out of the window. I was constantly finding purses, powder-puffs, artificial teeth, safety-pins, hymn-books, etc., on the lawn, and never suspected the culprit until she was caught in the act.
She also had a habit of sitting on the top of the front door and dropping golf-balls on the head of the postman, whom, either for his red hair or his Radical opinions, she disliked bitterly.
She would eat and drink anything, including ice-pudding and green Chartreuse, and was always peculiarly cheerful on Thursday evenings, when _The Scottish Meekly_ reaches our house.
Illustration: "BETTER 'AVE ONE AND READ ABOUT IT NOW, SIR; IT MIGHT BE CONTERADICTED IN THE MORNING."
"What do you do?" asked Charles, "when people want you to play lawn-tennis?"
"Sometimes I play," I said. "Sometimes I send Sophonisba. Sometimes I tell them that my head-keeper is away and I am obliged to look after the lop-ears. What happens to you?"
"Well, you know what lawn-tennis is like nowadays. In the bygone butter-pat era I could hold my own with the best of them. Golf had hardly come in, and when one wasn't playing cricket, and the spilliken set had been mislaid, and tiddley-winks was voted too rough, a couple of sets or so was rather fun. Soft undulating courts, very hard to keep a footing on, and plenty of sticks and leaves to assist one's screws, and patches of casual whiting here and there so that you could say that it wasn't a fault but hit the line. Now all that is changed. Panther-limbed, hawk-eyed young persons leap about the lawn dressed in white from top to toe. They play on fast and level lawns, entirely circumscribed by a kind of deep-sea trawling apparatus. They want you to hit hard and well. I have only two strokes when I hit hard. One of them pierces the bottom of the seine or drag-net fixed across the fairway, the other brings the man round from the next-door garden but two to say that his cucumbers are catching cold. And then I do not understand their terms. What is a 'fore-hand drive'? It sounds like the coaching Marathon. And how do you put on top spin? Do you wind your racquet round and round the ball and then pull it away suddenly, or what? And cross-volleys--what in the world are they?"