The Wasp, 1913 · page 325 of 364
The Wasp — 1913 — page 325: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *The Wasp* contains serialized fiction rather than a cartoon. It depicts James Burnham, a character who has stolen jewels (rubies, emeralds, sapphires) and sold his soul for them. Now emotionally deadened, he sells some stones to a London pawnbroker. The narrative satirizes criminal desperation and moral corruption through Burnham's cold calculation. He deceives the pawnbroker by posing as an aristocratic gambler forced to liquidate family heirlooms—a common Victorian-era excuse. The satire targets both the criminal underworld and the gullibility of pawnbrokers who accept such transparent lies. The "devilish glint in his eyes" suggests he's a con artist exploiting social assumptions about class and respectability to fence stolen goods. This appears to be a morality tale about damnation and spiritual emptiness disguised as social criticism.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
318 THE WASP blue flames; rubies pulsing as red as living hearts; emeralds and sapphires—the glinting, wonderful things which he had taken and paid for in blood to the everlasting damnation of his soul. He surveyed them without eagerness, without re- pulsion, without emotion of any kind. The time had been when such a display of treasure would have set his eye glinting and his blood racing; but now, with cool eyes and unshaken fingers, he se- lected a dozen of the smaller stones from the mass and stowed them away in a pocket of his coat. He then returned the rest of the collection to its hiding- place. James Burnham knew London high and low. ‘There were pawnbrokers in London then as now; and the peculiar characteristics of that ancient call- ing have not changed in a fraction over two cen- turies. James went to one of these, and to exactly the right one for his purpose. With his fine clothes and his fine manner he passed himself off as a reckless young lord who had lost so heavily at play that he was reduced to selling the family trinkets. Thanks to the devilish glint in his eyes, which Comichooks.com