Puck's Summer Salad

Samuel D. Ehrhart fills this full-color double-page spread with six comic vignettes arranged around a lush central oval—a man leaning from a garret window, romanticizing rural life. The surrounding panels gently puncture that fantasy. "Not the Real Thing" shows Minerva scolding Cupid for summer flirtations; "How It Happened" lampoons a city couple's hasty purchase of a farmhouse they know nothing about; "An Argument" depicts a young woman refusing to swim again; "The Similarity" pairs newlyweds with farm animals; "True Economy" has a farmer confessing he takes boarders precisely so he can neglect feeding them. The "Ballade of Farm House Ways" verse at center ties the vignettes together thematically. The humor is class-inflected—city vacationers are the rubes, farmers the dry-witted realists—typical of Puck's late-Gilded-Age satirical mode targeting bourgeois summer escapism.