Last Breath

I don’t think any tragedy in literature that I have ever come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I spelled out slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad fox has got the red hen. There was something so dramatically complete about it; the badness of the fox, added to all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to heighten the horror of the hen’s fate, and there was such a suggestion of masterful malice about the word “got.” One felt that a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from the bad fox.

- Saki (H. H. Munro), “The Unbearable Bassington”