Life — July 27, 1922 — page 5: what you’re looking at

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

HILE the possibilities of cro- \ quet as a game have unques- tionably been realized to the full, the matter of croquet as a weapon has received scant attention. The efficacy oi the thing came over me just the other night. | had been strolling about the yn in the dusk of the evening,— . time, by the way, when I do my st thinking.—and had come in yrtly afterwards with a bump on forehead, a cut over my eye, and wicket still clinging to my left nkle, when the big idea came. Shot gun, rifle, poison gas, sling -lot, steel traps, boiling water, bow d arrow, are all obvious enough, t their practical use is prohibited law, while croquet is still sup- ysed to have its proper sphere on the side lawn of domicile or country club. And yet its possibilities as an lly to crime or as a means of de- fense are virtually unlimited. Let s take up the deadly wicket, for example, which is precisely what one ves do with whichever part of the vot happens to be the most sensi- LIFE Croquet as a Weapon tive. No more effective means of inflicting bodily injury could possibly be devised—the sharp impact on the ankle, the sudden lurch, the pros- trate form. Consider the sinister stake—the quick jab just below the knee—the thud—the hospital. However, it is the devilish subtlety of the thing that particularly recom- mends it. For years people have been knocked down, battered, scratched and torn by croquet sets working under the protection of night; and yet so trusting is man, so ready to see the good side rather than the bad, that it is Rollo and Marguerite playing their morning game in the sunshine that is remem- bered, rather than the unconscious form of poor old Judge Comfort draped over the center wicket on that gloomy night in June. People who have been taught from infancy never to handle a loaded gun, will walk across a lawn, where lurks the croquet set, without fear or trepidation. People, I say, who would refuse a sniff of poison gas and balk at a drink of arsenic, will follow you lamb-like, no matter how dark the night, as you lead them into the snares of the croquet trap. It may be your croquet set on your lawn, and the person whom you consign to its tentacles may be your worst enemy, but while the wickets throw him this way and that and the stakes batter him to a pulp, you may stand on the side-line and laugh, safe in the assurance that no coroner’s jury can touch you. And as a means of defense—well, let Japan make the most of the Mutsu as long as we have croquet. H. B. Potentiality AM a potential poetess, And I sing of potential love. (Though the sky at present is clouded, There’s potential moonlight above.) Oh, dearest potential sweetheart, Beloved—no matter who— You may not know, but potentially I'm madly in love with you! L. P.G. Revising a Myth What really happened when Saint George met the Dragon. comicbooks.com