Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 109, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 October 1899 — Wild Beasts and Pans. [ARTICLE]

Wild Beasts and Pans.

A pan is to wild creatures one of the most terrifying products of civilization. Kula is a district in the Himalayas, consisting of a chain of the most lovely valleys conceivable, with this drawback among others, that each hillpath that rune by the inhabitants’ hats, more often than not contains a lurking leopard. One day a worthy Kula housewife came out from her cooking, and, standing on the ledge of rock at her door, emptied a pan of boiling water Into the rank herbage growing below. It fell splash on the back of a sleeping leopard, who Jumped perpendicularly Into the air as high as the roof of the hut What might have happened next, who can say? But the astonished woman dropped the pan with a dang upon the rock, and the leopard took one leap down hill. The pan followed, and the leopard’s downward leaps became longer and swifter as the pan bounded after It from rock to rock. When last seen the leopard had just achieved a leap of about 350 feet to the very bottom of the ravine, thousands of feet below, and the pan bad whirled about 500 feet over it on to the opposite side. The leopard would have, eaten the old woman with but a pan,* the contents of which first scalded half the hide off him and then bounded clanging In bis wake from the top of the Himalayas to the plains below was something he couid not face.