Word: sketches
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Best character sketch is that of Shorty Harris, grouchy, restless, simple-minded prospector who tramped Death Valley for 50 years, found five rich mines, got almost nothing for them. When he found The Bullfrog in 1904 a saloon keeper kept him drunk for three weeks, got him to sell his claim for $1,000 and three barrels of whiskey. When he found The Harrisburg soon after he became a partner in the company formed to work it, taking stock which he did not know was assessable. Author Coolidge hired Shorty Harris to guide him across the Valley to Death Valley...
...plant-feeding dinosaur, tentatively named Atlantosaurus montanus, discovered in Colorado. The verses were composed by an author-traveler named Frank Cowan of Greensburg, Pa., published in Vol. III, No. 1, of Ward's Natural Science Bulletin, dated Jan. 1, 1884. The same issue contained a sketch of a brontosaurus, a facetiously polysyllabic and mildly risque poem about a mermaid and an octopus, articles on the musk ox and the flying fox of Australia; also included was a business-like list of catalogs for the sale of such natural history specimens as human skeletons. North American bird eggs, glass models...
Like its rival, Sketch, the Toiler combined fiction and fun in its Christmas annual. Both magazines had colored centre spreads, Tatter's by Comic Artist Henry Mayo Bateman, who contributed "The Gigolo Who Refused to Dance"; Sketch's by the late Sporting Artist Cecil Aldin who drew a Dickensian "Christmas Coach Crossing Marlborough Downs." With art lovers, Sketch went one up by giving away a colored insert of "Ballet" by Dame Laura Knight, A. R. A. The London Sphere's Christmas annual featured the Victoria & Albert Museum's wax "Nativity," while the Illustrated London News...
...trips to Spain, Italy, Switzerland. She was less impressed than John Adams' grandson by many of the famed figures they met. Adams, for instance, described the English poet Richard Monckton Milnes as a gifted eccentric "with a Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus." But Clover drew an unforgettable sketch: "As for Milnes, he shows little of the ideal poet. He is old and stout, very scrubbily dressed, his teeth vanish down his throat when he giggles, which is very often, and then, by a most interesting tour de force, he reinstates them; and his method of eating is more...
...special agents from Chicago, of the drive to Little Bohemia in ramshackle cars, of sneaking through the woods at night, of his attempted resignation when the full proportions of the catastrophe became clear. Thereafter he adopts an impersonal tone, discourses on the duties of Federal agents, gives an unilluminating sketch of his own background, discusses the habits of gangsters and the weakness of law enforcement, retells the stories of the Factor, Bremer, Urschel and Robinson kidnappings, the deaths of Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger. Best parts of American Agent are its thumbnail biographies of public enemies: Verne...