Two very old stories are worth repeating for their peculiar excellence. A Scotch newspaper, reporting the danger that an express-train had run in consequence of a cow going upon the line, said, ‘As the safest way, the engineer put on full steam, dashed up against the cow, and literally cut her into calves.’ In the earlier half of this century a London paper announced that Sir Robert Peel and a party of fiends were shooting peasants in Ireland.

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892