At dinner, a dish of stewed eels made Mr. Higgs a little pensive, and he remarked, "that the fair sex slipped through your fingers just like eels." This innuendo was, however, all that disturbed the enjoyment of the day, whose hilarity, as the newspapers say of a public dinner, was prolonged to a late hour.
1831, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XV, in Romance and Reality. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], page 273