The Wasp, 1913 · page 42 of 364
The Wasp — 1913 — page 42: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains **fictional narrative text**, not a political cartoon. It's an excerpt from what appears to be an adventure or survival story serialized in *The Wasp* magazine. The passage depicts a man stranded in a boat, weakened from hunger and thirst, who awakens from a nightmare. He's haunted by the image of a dead man and now discovers—terrifyingly but apparently in reality—a shark circling his boat mere feet below the surface. **No identifiable political figures or satirical commentary** are present on this page. The content is dramatic fiction rather than satire or social commentary. Without additional context about the full story's author, publication date, or surrounding pages, we cannot determine if this narrative carries broader allegorical meaning for *The Wasp*'s readership, though the survival-at-sea scenario was a popular literary genre of the era.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
i ,— THE WASP 41 He awoke with the horror of the dream still upon him. He lay on his back in the bottom of the boat. The stars had paled and the sky was like a pearl-gray shell. The white gull drifted into his line of vision on motionless wings, hung directly over him, and looked down with its red eyes. Then he remembered where he was, how he had come there, and what his fate was likely to be. He was hungry, for he had been two nights and a day without food. He was thirsty. He was about to sit up and take the water-breaker in his hands when the sound that had haunted his dream came to his ears—the sound of something bumping softly along the side of the boat. He scrambled to his knees with a gasp of terror, then remembered that the dead man had been only a thing of his dreaming. He looked straight down over the starboard gunwale and saw the long, vague shape of the shark at rest close beside him, not more than a foot beneath the brightening surface of the sea. His heart shook, for here was a sinister omen indeed; but with sudden fury he raised an oar Comichooks.com