Poor Green himself, whose repeated failures from the back window as a marksman had disgusted him with that method of attack, got a long cavalry sword, and determined to tackle the enemy with cold steel.
Alas! there was no preliminary consultation. Why, oh, why, was not Lord Rossmore there to direct the strategy of these noble defenders of homes and altars, civil and religious liberty, and uninterrupted snores?
About 11.30 on New-Year’s night, the quadrupedal Pattis and Nicolinis commenced their usual grand concert. Green waited patiently until they had got through the preliminary solos, but when they commenced some Wagnerian horror in chorus, he slipped out silently, in wrath and his night-shirt, and crept, sword in hand, towards the fatal shed.
Almost at the same moment three neighboring windows were noiselessly raised, and preparations for three terrific onslaughts were rapidly perfected.
It was dark,—so dark that the gleaming orbits of the phosphorescent choristers could scarcely be discerned, and the artillerists and rifle rangers had little but the mortifying music to direct their deadly aim.
Suddenly that ceased. The videttes of the caterwauling corps had caught a glimpse of Green’s nightgown as it was floating and fluttering gracefully in the winter breeze. In an instant, however, mounting a step-ladder, he was amongst them; and as the sabre of his sire whirled round him in vengeful sweeps, stabs, slashes, and scintillations, a hundred expressions of feline astonishment, fear, pain, expostulation, and rage burst like a tornado from the lungs of a hundred different cats, and the concentrated essence of their three months’ lyrical training surged through their teeth in one stupendous, ear-splitting, paralyzing, five-hundred-dollar prize screech.
Victory irradiated the manly brow of Green with a mystic halo; but alas, like Wolfe at Quebec, or Nelson at Trafalgar, he was fated to fall in the hour of his triumph, for just then a jagged brick, hurled by Tomlinson with the velocity of a bombshell, caught him in the small of the back, a washing-mug, donated to the general good by the Roman matron spirit of Mrs. T., was splintered into fragments on his head, a shower of sharp-pointed paving-stones rattled about his ribs, and when he turned round to scream “Cease Firing,” a three-inch Niagara from the grocery caught him square in the mouth, and tumbled him head over heels off the shed. As he was wheeling in an insane somersault through the air, bang! went Jones’s blunderbuss, and it seemed to Green as if all the cats had suddenly combined in a ferocious and fiendish charge upon his person, and were clawing him in about ten million directions.
The doctors have been exploring his carcass ever since, and striking new veins of scrap-iron and lead at every excavation. The nurses at the Northern Hospital say that no such thrilling sight has ever been witnessed in that institution in their experience as is afforded by the spectacle of one surgeon taking nails out of his legs with a pair of pincers, while another operates on his shoulder with a screw-driver, and the third man threads the eyes of protruding needles and draws them out by the gross. It is the general opinion among these professional men that to clear him out thoroughly they want a laborer or two with pickaxes and shovels.
Green himself vows that, if he ever recovers, he will quit L. O. L. 1111 forever. When the rank and file can’t tell the difference between a tom-cat and a grand master, it’s time to vacate the latter post. He thinks the government is very remiss in allowing the Orangemen to retain their weapons. If Jones don’t get three years under the Crimes Act for carrying arms in a proclaimed district and perforating a loyal hide with the contents of a tinker’s budget—why, he’ll join the Fenians, that’s all. They have one motto he appreciates:—
WHETHER on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle’s van,
The fittest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man.