Life, 1910-05-19 · page 25 of 40
Life — May 19, 1910 — page 25: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct elements: **Top Image & Caption:** A cartoon showing people and animals in apparent chaos near a farmhouse. The caption "Oon! Let's run. Maybe it's a bull!" suggests someone has mistaken an animal for a dangerous bull, prompting panicked flight. The humor lies in the misidentification causing unnecessary alarm. **Text Section:** A book review column discussing novels by Eden Phillpotts and a memoir by Captain W.W. Urquhart about his merchant marine experiences. The reviewer criticizes Phillpotts for lengthy landscape descriptions that interrupt his narratives, but praises his character development. Urquhart's book is praised for its authentic conversational style recounting life at sea, including his role in rescuing survivors from the 1873 wreck of the *Ville du Havre*. **Bottom Cartoon:** "The Right Watch" - A brief humorous dialogue between two women about husbands. The "Other Wife" quips that husbands need watching "from night till morning," implying infidelity or misbehavior during evening hours—a marital joke about spousal mistrust.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
“oon! Ler’s Run, HERE area number of extremely unimportant questions that from time to time I find myself lazily curious about, and I have sometimes wondered whether, if I should take, say, one a week, ind ask it of every one I met, I could work them off without its being noticed. One of them Does any one actually continue, year by year, to read the descriptive pas- ges in Mr. Phillpotts’s novels? ’” Personally I confess to having long since recognized and accepted the fact that he is subject to intermittent and occasionally violent attacks of weather and landscape which I treat by saying “ Umum" to myself while searching for the place where the story begins again. Not but what Mr, Phillpotts is lyric in these deliriums, but simply because, coming as they do in the fairway of his tale, they constitute obstructions to navigation. In his new novel, The Thief of Virtue (John Lane, $1.50), these topo- graphical and meteorological reefs are rather more frequent LLERS! THOSE, RATS ARE GETTING AWAY WITHA WHOLE FARMHOUSE-—SHEEP, COWS AND ALL!” ta ee MAYBE IT’S A BULLI" but a good skipper by keeping a weather eye to windward will casily avoid them. The story deals with a clash of temperaments between a Devon farmer and a boy whom he supposes to be his son, and is perhaps less closely woven than the best of its author's works, But it shares with the best of these its author's skill in creating living char- acters and that vision for the essential humanity that under- lies the local type, which is his distinguishing claim to con- sideration as a novelist than usual, HERE is an odd prejudice, widely entertained, that a book, to be properly so called, should read like a book as well as look like one, which makes it a trifle difficult to give a name to a small volume by W. W. Urquhart called Reminiscences, The Merchant Marine (at G. P. Putnam's Sons, 75 cents), which docs not read at all like a book but very much like listening to an old sea captain in the smoking compartment of a Pullman—an old sea captain whom you had supposed, until he joined in the desultory talk, to be, say, a Congregational minister. Captain Urquhart, in addition to having been at sea in sailing vessels for twenty-cight years, was in command of the Trimountain, that, in the fall of 1873 rescued eighty-five of the survivors of the Ville du Havre, and his account of that classic wreck should still be of interest to many Americans. J. B. Kerfoot. The Right Watch HE WIFE'S CALLER (lightly): These husbands of ours need watching from morning till night. Tue Otnrr Wire (less lightly): Say rather from night till morning. Ccomicbooks.com