Life, 1889-08-15 · page 7 of 16
Life — August 15, 1889 — page 7: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Analysis of "An Interruption" - Life Magazine, Page 91 This page features a series of four comic illustrations titled "An Interruption," depicting camping or outdoor scenes. The sketches show progressively more chaotic situations at what appears to be a campsite with a tent. The humor appears to stem from the escalating disruption of a peaceful camping experience—likely showing someone's outdoor retreat being interrupted by increasingly absurd circumstances (possibly weather, animals, or other campers). The accompanying text discusses romantic getaways and book recommendations for leisure time, making the visual gag an ironic counterpoint: while the article suggests peaceful outdoor reading, the cartoons show camping going humorously wrong. The artist's signature appears to be present on the final illustration, though it's not entirely clear from this reproduction.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
* LIFE: read a romance of Africa or the Wild West, when you can AN INTERRUPTION. within six hours of the city find very respectable mountains —out of reach of the mob of summer boarders—where you can climb for hours along winding trails, or strike out into the unbroken woods, along moss-covered ridges and over rocky summits—far away from the haste and noise of the market, in the clean air of the high levels. You can do this in forty-eight hours, and return to work, feeling that “you have had a little romance in yours,” prosaic as the rest of the ‘week may be. And you are not too old at forty, or fifty, or sixty for that kind of romance. You can roll off a decade of years for-every thousand feet of altitude, and on a moun- tain summit you are, like Faust, a very young man again, with the world to win and hope to do it. . . . UT there may be a rainy evening in camp, a cool night in the city, a quiet hour on boat or train when you want a book for company. There are few among those recently published that one may recommend for such an hour with any great confidence in pleasing you. It would not be hard to pick out a score of old friends for these occa- sions, but you also know them and keep a corner for them in your trunk. Still among the new books you may find pleasure in Burroughs’s “Indoor Studies,” Mrs. Burnett's “Pretty Sister of José,” Hopkinson Smith's “ White Um- brella in Mexico,” the replies to Prosper Merimée’s letters, entitled “An Author's Love,” or the translation of Balzac’s “ Seraphita.” If you are epigrammatic you may find amusement in the aphorisms of “ Blots and Blemishes,” which warn you tersely against most of the evils of life—“from those that tramp their way through life on other people's corns,” “from fel- lows who find it easy to kick a man that is down, and—do it,” and “from the root of all evil—too much money, and the bane of all bliss—too little of it.” I{ you are a very young woman you will like “ A Woodland Wooing,” which Eleanor Putnam (now dead) wrote in the bright, clear style that was the charm of her “Old Salem.” If you are a young man, between college and matrimony, you will like Mr. Pierson’s collection of society verse by many American writers, which he calls “ The Merry Muse.” A young woman, in her third or fourth season, would also like these verses. And, finally, if you are a wise man or woman, you will tead just as few books as possible while sky and trees invite ~Yowout of doors. Droch. comicbooks.com