Judge — December 20, 1924 — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

MERRY CHRISTMAS! CHRISTMAS EVE Moperx Mato—Hello! Police station? Well, I've trapped a burglar in my room who has been trying to pull the old Santa Claus gag on me. I'll keep him till you send up your bus. 2 Pants=1 Coat? Nouks always ask me why, for the past forty years, I have continu- ously worn the same suit of pepper and salt clothes; and I always reply to them: Beeause J abhor waste, despise loose ends, and suffer from am evenness complex—an_ all-obses- sive penchant for the leveling of hills and filling of valleys. The truth of the matter is that I have heen a victim of the 2-pants suit hypothesis, that illusory theory which economically equates 2 trousers with 1 coat. Economically! Ha-ha! Forty years ago to-day T bought my first 2-pants suit. But were my sartorial affairs evened up thereby? - | Minature SUID. fracelet, ancl Very pretty Xmas gift for milady. True, the coat did not survive the second pair of trousers, but that was the pity of it. My first « worn out, three more months of wear in the second pants, what was I to do Dut buy a second coat to match? And a third pair of trousers to give the brand-new jacket a run for its money? And yet, even after these extraor- dinary precautions, the second coat still had two and a half months of wear left in it when the third pair of pants had worn themselves unfit for publication; whereupon true cconomy demanded that I purchase a fourth pair of pepper and salt trousers and—to give the fourth trousers their proper wearing val a third pepper and salt coat, and a fifth pants to cateh up to the third coat, and a fourth coat to fully evaluate the fifth pants, But enough! You n these items, the desperate mill race. which T have been run ning. I had hoped, in this the fortieth year of my 2-pants experi- ment to equate matters; by careful mathematical calculation, Thi computed that on the eighth of the coming month, the knees of my eighty-eighth pepper and. salt pants would give way exactly at the moment that my elbows would break through the sleeves of my forty- ninth pepper and salt coat, Alas! Last night my house took fire, and while my forty-ninth was burned 1 imbecile fireman (curse him!) ued the eighty-eighth trou- sers, for which T must now buy the fiftieth coat, thus continuing the maddening 2-trouser cycle that I shall be unable to halt. unless I live to be over a hundred. However, there is hope yet. some day T shall have to dic some day T must be translate infinity where the parallel lines meet, and TL coat wears and wears out—with matl ical evenness as 2 pairs of pants! Cyril B. Egan “Hey, Santy Claus! You forgot to fill my stocking!” comicbooks.com