Look before you sit

     He realized that he had a lot of tense thinking to do, and to assist thought he sat down on the bed. Or, to be accurate, on the dead cat which was lying on the bed. It was this cat which the Alsatian had been licking just before the final breach in his relations with Freddie - the object, if you remember, which the later had supposed to be a cushion.

    He leaped up as if the corpse, instead of being cold, had been piping hot. He stared down, hoping against hope that the animal was merely in some sort of coma. But a glance told him that it had made the great change. He had never seen a deader cat. After life's fitful fever it slept well.

(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)