Hyacinth o'Toole

In the course of my life I have met with more accidents and assaults than twenty other men, and they never cost me any trouble to speak of -- cuts, prods, and gunshot, all came quite natural, and healed like enchantment. It was a murdering pity I was not a general. I could have stood any amount of hacking, and slashing, and riddling, and been never the worse man, nor a week on the sick-list. A shoemaker mistook me one day for a county Cork man that was paying attentions to his wife, and gave me a slice with his half-moon knife -- bad luck to that ugly instrument -- as I was walking down Petticoat Lane, no more thinking of his wife, I give you my solemn honour, than Saint Joseph of Arimathea was of Potiphar's. The next thing was, Baron Dromdouski -- a Polish refugee of distinction, and a perfect gentleman, I will say, and played the guitar like an angel, though liable occasionally to be carried away by his feelings -- stuck me with an oyster-knife, while we were differing on politics, in the "Good Samaritan" in Exchange Street. I could count up fifty such unlucky catastrophes; but I think the worst was, what happened to me as I was whistling in the hall of my lodgings, where I was waiting to take Miss Doolan out for a walk.

I must tell you there's nothing on earth I hate equal to a cat, and it is the only thing that walks on feet I was ever thoroughly affeard to look in the face. It's a dread that was born with me, and it will never leave me; and I'd run into Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace away from one, and I think I'd have jumped after Quintus Curtius into the bottomless abyss if there was a cat behind me.