Life, 1916-08-31 · page 9 of 34
Life — August 31, 1916 — page 9: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Image:** "The Sun Dial" depicts a formal garden scene with tall trees framing a circular sun dial. This appears to be an architectural or landscape photograph rather than satirical content. **Middle Section - "Why Not?":** A brief dialogue joke where a clerk asks a little girl if she wants to rent a penny toy displayed in a fenced enclosure. The humor derives from the absurdity of charging rental fees for inexpensive children's toys. **Bottom Image & "25 and 50":** The illustration shows a shipwrecked stranger, captioned "YES, THIS MUST BE THE COAST OF NEW ENGLAND." The accompanying text mocks Nantucket's widows who hire men to sleep in their homes as protection against "nocturnal dangers"—charging 25 cents hourly for daytime odd jobs and 50 cents for nighttime security services. The satire targets perceived Yankee frugality and opportunism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE SUN DIAL Now, see here, little girl, 1 can't spend the y showing you penny toys. Do you want the carth with a little red fence around it for one cent? Litttr Giri: Let me see it. 25 and 50 ip Nantucket there are many widows and spinsters, left quite alone, who are accustomed to hire a man to sleep in their houses to ward off any possible nocturnal dangers, One man who came to have quite a business in this line, put out, above his door, a sign which read as follows: Odd jobs during the day, Twenty-five cents an hour, Sleeping with nervous old ladies, Fifty cents “LJOW much of an operation did the doctor perform on you?” “Oh, he took out a couple of thousand dollars’ worth vhipwrecked Stranger: YES, THIS MUS1 BE THE COAST OF ecm: of my insides. NEW ENGLAND. comicbooks.com