Tobermory (short story)

"The panic which ensued was not confined to the Major", and it becomes general when the guests remember that Tobermory is in the habit of walking along a balustrade that runs outside the bedroom windows.

"An archangel ecstatically proclaiming the Millennium, and then finding that it clashed unpardonably with Henley and would have to be indefinitely postponed, could hardly have felt more crestfallen than Cornelius Appin at the reception of his wonderful achievement."

The remainder of the day is spent in nervous anticipation of Tobermory's return, a plateful of poisoned fish scraps having been prepared for him, but he makes no appearance.

The first was originally published in the 27 November 1909 issue of The Westminster Gazette,[3] and eventually reprinted in Peter Haining's Saki Short Stories 2 (London: Dent, 1983).

One figures in Kurd Lasswitz's "Psychotomy" (1893), and they were to recur after Munro's time in Clare Winger Harris's "The Evolutionary Monstrosity" (1929), Harl Vincent's "Prowler of the Wastelands" (1935), Carl Peregoy's "Shortwave Experiment" (1935), and Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers" (1958).

[10][11] Munro's use of such a character in a beast fable to obliquely criticise social conventions puts "Tobermory" in a tradition that goes back to Aesop, Statius, and Horace.

[12] In this fable the talking cat can be seen as representing human nature untrammelled by bourgeois good manners, hypocritical pretence of concern for others, and conventional respectability.