SIMPSON'S NEW ROOF
Down in Tuckahoe NJ, there is a man named Simpson who has a flat roof on his
house covered with tin - so says Max Adeler. The roof got to leaking badly,
and it happened to occur to Simpson that it would be a good thing to cover
the whole surface with the material out of which concrete pavements are
made, in order to make it perfectly tight. A man was accordingly engaged,
and he covered the tin with concrete to the depth of four inches.
The curse of Tuckahoe is cats. In warm weather millions of them assemble and
hold ratification meetings and rehearsals and general synods out in the
backyards and on the roofs. In Tuckahoe the heat is unusually intense, and
Mr Simpson was unusually annoyed by the animated discussions of the cats in
his neighborhood. The more he "shooed" them and flung old boots at them, the
more they yelled.
Night after night it grew more terrific, and day by day Mr Simpson observed
that the mysterious caterwauling continued during all the hours of daylight.
Simpson hadn't a bootjack or a blacking brush or a rolling pin or a cologne
bottle left to throw at them.
At last, one moonlit night, the uproar got to be so outrageous that Simpson
arose from his bed, determined to ascertain what all this growling meant
anyhow! It appeared to him that the noise came from the top of the house.
He went up into the garret and put his head out of the trap door.
There he found 196 cats stuck fast knee-deep in the concrete, which had been
softened by the heat. Some of them had been there four days. The minute they
caught sight of Simpson the whole 196 doubled up their spines, ruffled up
their back hair, snaked their tails, and gave one unearthly howl which shook
Simpson's nerves so much that he dropped the trap door and fell down the
step ladder on the head of Mrs Simpson, who was standing below dressed in a
thing with a frill on it, and armed with a palm-leaf fan and a bed slat,
determined to protect Simpson to the death.
Simpson has since sold the house to a man who makes sausages and fur
tippets, and it is whispered around Tuckahoe that his actual gains average
forty dollars a night.
*** This report was originally published in the September 2 1875 issue of
the Boston Evening Transcript.