"Child, you will take cold."
"I take cold? But how well that overcoat fits him!"—From El Mundo Cómico, Madrid, 1873.
Picture of nurse, infant, and father. The father says: "Tell me, nurse; every body says it looks like me, but I think it takes after its mother more." The nurse replies: "When it laughs, yes; but when it frowns, it looks like you atrociously."
Picture of a "fast-looking" woman and the janitor of a lodging-house. He says: "You wish to see the landlord? I think he does not mean to have ladies in his house who are alone." She replies: "I am never alone."
Picture of young lady in bed, to whom a servant holds up an elegant bonnet, and says: "Tell me, since you are ill, and can not go to the ball, will you lend this to your affectionate and faithful servant, since I give you my word not to injure it?"
Picture of husband and wife at home, she taking out a note that had been concealed in a handkerchief. He speaks: "A woman who deceives her husband deserves no pity." She replies: "But if she does not deceive her husband, whom is she to deceive?"
Picture of the manager of a theatre in his office, to whom enters a dramatic author. Author: "I have called to know if you have read my play." Manager: "Not yet. It is numbered, in the list of plays received, 792; so that for this year—" Author: "No, sir; nor for that which is to come either."
This will suffice for the "Comic Almanac." The Comic World (El Mundo Cómico), which next invites attention, is a weekly paper published at Madrid during the last four years. This work, also, has much in common with the wicked world of Paris, as with the wicked world of all countries where the priest feeds the imagination and starves the intellect. This reveling in the illicit and the indecent, which so astonishes us in the popular literature of Catholic countries, is merely a sign of impoverished mind, which is obliged to revolve ceaselessly about the physical facts of our existence, because it is acquainted with so few other facts.