The Wasp, 1913 · page 12 of 364
The Wasp — 1913 — page 12: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains no cartoon or visual satire—it's narrative prose from a story titled "The Wasp." The text introduces **James Burnham**, third son of Sir Walter Burnham of Berkshire, and describes his father as a hard, temperamental man obsessed with marking his possessions with the family heraldic device. The passage focuses on Sir Walter's compulsive need to brand everything he owns—from valuable silver plate engraved with full coats of arms to farmhouses marked with a four-barred hurdle device. This appears to be character exposition establishing James's family background and his father's controlling, aristocratic personality as setup for the narrative. Without seeing other pages, the satirical target of this story remains unclear.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE WASP 11 in rich silks and made merry with rare wines. Kitty had left him as a rat leaves a doomed ship. James Burnham was the third of four brothers, the sons of Sir Walter Burnham, of Burnham, near Wantage in Berkshire. Sir Walter was a hard man and a hard rider, upright in his saddle and in his dealings with his fellows, high-tempered and unforgiving and full of peculiar whims. One of his whims—and it took on the dignity of a passion with him—was to put his mark on every article in his possession. His mark was the heral- dic device of the Burnhams of Burnham; or, in some cases, only a part of that device. Large and highly valued pieces of plate were engraved with the paternal arms, topped by the helmet, the wreath, and the crest, and underpinned by that brief but honorable and poetic statement, “Expectans equito.” On smaller pieces the crest only was cut. On his house of Burnham and on a dozen farmhouses and a score of cottages the four-barred hurdle, a device from his arms, was cut deep in the stone. But he drove his passion for putting his mark on things Comichooks.com