Life, 1883-10-11 · page 5 of 16
Life — October 11, 1883 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# "A Soft Answer" - Life Magazine, Page 175 This page contains a humorous six-panel comic strip titled "While duck-hunting Pilkins discovers a bear" that depicts slapstick mishaps involving a man named Pilkins encountering a bear near a boat. The panels progress from discovery through escalating chaos, ending with Pilkins safely departed by boat. Below the comic is a prose piece, "A Soft Answer," describing a man returning home late and his wife detecting suspicious odors on him—cloves, cinnamon, and apple. His explanations (brandy, ham sandwich, mince pie) attempt to deflect her suspicion of infidelity with plausible but increasingly unconvincing alibis. The humor relies on marital tension and the husband's clumsy deceptions about his evening activities.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
No 1. White duck-huriti discovers a bear’ NI. He pours alt his shot Mo 3, And goes ashore yn order fo Gate steadier aim, nfo the = i jun fo make sure work, Mon. But being semen nervous shoofs wide A SOFT ANSWER. 'T WAS past twelve at midnight when he rolled home and prepared to concoct some story for the lateness of his return, She, however, was awake, and with sharp-scented nose detected an odor of gin. ‘* What smell is that, my dear?” she remarked. “Cloves,” my love.” “ But the other odor, sir?” ** Allspice, my sweet.” SSS “ But I smell something else.” “Ob, that ’s cinnamon.” ‘But Iam certain I smell something that isn’t spice at all.” “Oh, that’s an apple I ate before I came in.” “* Well, I should think,” she replied, “that if you'd just taken a good drink of brandy before you came in and eaten a ham sandwich you would have had all the ingredients necessary for ‘a good mince pie.” He sighed as he dropped to sleep, and murmured that he'd have done so if he had n’t been afraid of bad dreams, comicbooks.com