Tom and Terrier
A fox terrier spies what looks like a hapless victim – until he gets up close.
1889
Introduction
Jerome K. Jerome’s comic travelogue ‘Three Men in a Boat’ is subtitled ‘to say nothing of the dog’. In this extract, the dog Montmorency - a fox terrier - plays a starring role, but unfortunately not a particularly glorious one.
HALF-way up the High Street a cat darted out from one of the houses in front of us, and began to trot across the road. Montmorency gave a cry of joy — the cry of a stern warrior who sees his enemy given over to his hands — the sort of cry Cromwell might have uttered when the Scots came down the hill — and flew after his prey.*
His victim was a large black Tom. I never saw a larger cat, nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose.
Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour; but the cat did not seem to have grasped the idea that its life was in danger. It trotted quietly on until its would-be assassin was within a yard of it, and then looked at Montmorency with a gentle, inquiring expression, that said:
“Yes! You want me?”
In the Civil War, Cromwell comprehensively defeated Scottish royalists at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, and captured Edinburgh. A year later, he defeated Charles II at Worcester, on September 3rd 1651. Many of the vanquished Scots were deported and forced into work in the West Indies and the American colonies.