Judge — March 2, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ble in heating the house was perennial in winter, and the lady derived a certain ghastly joy from emphasizing the fact and making it as annoying to Grimley as possible. Always, as her blood congealed, the fountains of speech thawed, and she poured out a flood of wounding expressions addressed to Grimley who, in the presence of the damning evidence of the thermometer, was as help- less as a tortoise denuded of its carspace. Incidentally, the lady had the pleasure of considering herself a member of the Noble Army of Martyrs —a situation eminently satisfying toall right- minded women. Througha merci- ful dispensation of Providence, how- ever, there is one place where a man can be warm and forget. He can go to bed, a joy not les- sened by the fact that few, even of the most garrulous women talk in their sleep. A delicious gense_ of warmth permeated Grimley ashe drifted off into unconscious- ness with a blissful feeling of leaving all heating apparatus on the further shore. But even the halls of somnolence may be in- vaded, and presently Grimley’s repose was oppressed by appalling visions. Into the realm of sleep, that curse of his waking hours, the furnace, suddenly projected itself. Seven times heated, it sat on the footboard and gloated over him. He felt choked and smothered by its fiery breath —and woke to find himself bathed in perspiration. “What is that blamed furnace doing now!” he mut- tered, as he struggled out onto the floor. The house recked of heat and it was plain that the infernal device, after having frozen them all day, now proposed to broil them in their sleep. By the dim light of a candle he made his way to the cellar and tried to choke the thing off. It was no go. Despairing of ever getting it to “No, Gosu-DinG IT. anv it Dipn’r Stay in!” burn he had gone to bed leaving the drafts wide open, and with the perversity of its tribe it had started up in the night, gone into action as only a hot-air furnace can go after a period of conflict. Grimley shut off every- thing he could and went back to bed. This , time he dreamed no dreams, but was @wakened promptly at seven by the voice of his wife: “My dear,” he heard her mur- mur, “don’t you think you had better go down and look at the furnace?” With a sickening sense of the inevitable, he thrust his legs out in- to the frosty air and hastened again tothe cellar, now an Arctic waste of dead ashes and congealed pipes. “Another day of it!” he groaned, wearily, taking up the poker. As he did so, his eye was caught by a gaudy poster stuck up on the wall. In rich and mas- sive colors, it showed a house with the front sliced off. In the parlor, a smiling family fanned themselves amidst a bower of tropical plants, while a blizzard raged outside. In the cellar, a dainty maid caressed a furnace with what looked likea lead pencil. Across the face of this engaging composition, ran this legend: I RemMeMBERED IT THE FREEZEM FURNACE Keeps the house like June in January The heartless cynicism of the thing cut Grimley like a knife. ‘What an infernal lie!” he shouted, and hopped around on one leg to keep from freezing to death; and as he waited for the kindling wood to catch ablaze, a Voice came hurtling down the pipe: “Did you forget it and let it go out?” “No, gosh-ding it!” roared Grimley, “I remembered it and it didn’t stay in!” The Year With Seven Months: 4y Benjamin De Casseres ENTS, not minutes make time. eteen hundred and fourteen—ante-bellum 1914 seems to us today an ancient era. What happened between the first of January and the fourth of July of that year—few can remember offhand. We mustscratchour heads, wipe some tremendous nightmare away, walk oversky-high ruins to get back to that period. Theoldcalendar seems to have died in the latter daysof July, 1914, and some unnatural series of days to have begun. The events since the first of August in that year shocked and twisted the time-machinery of the human brain as it has never been twisted and shocked before. In the twentieth century there are two nineteen hundred and fourteens! comicbooks.com