March 30, 2013 by kihm

Easter Postcards

March 29, 2013 by kihm

Behold the Man

Ecce Homo (1871) by Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891)

“Ecce Homo” were the words used by Pontius Pilate, according to the 4^th century Vulgate (Latin) translation of John 19:5, when Pilate presented a scourged Jesus Christ to the hostile crowd. The King James Version of the Bible translates the phrase into English as “Behold the man!”

March 28, 2013 by kihm

Pets

“Marina lay upon a couch which was covered with a broad mantle of marten skins and fondled a fiery dragon with her right hand, while she played with two poisonous serpents with her left.”

— Illustration by Frank Cheyne Papé for The Russian Story Book (1916) by Richard Wilson

March 27, 2013 by kihm

On Traveling by Sea

“Protesting stomachs, shivering timbers, groaning machinery, whistling wind, breaking china, crying babies, and roaring waves are not music to the ear. Four senses out of five are systematically outraged, and, in nine cases out of ten, the fifth is rendered useless by the upward tendency of every article of food.”

— Kate Field, “At Sea” in Hap-Hazard (1873)

March 26, 2013 by kihm

The Mail Must Go Through

Mailman O.D. Hammond poses with horse, buggy, wife and dog at his home on Maple Street in Cuba, N.Y.

The mail comes by horse-drawn sleigh in Breckenridge, Minnesota.

The postman uses a wagon in Chester, Nova Scotia.

March 25, 2013 by kihm

The Green Singing Book

I don’t know how to read the words,
Nor how the black things go.
But if you stand it up, and sing,
You never have to know.

The music sounds alike each time
When grown-up people play;
But every time I sing, myself,
It sounds a different way.

And when I’ve sung the book all through,
And every page, around,
I stand it upside down and sing,
To see how that will sound.

I sing how all the things outside
The window look to me;
The shiny wrinkles in the road,
And then, about my Tree;

I sing about the City, too,
The noises and the wheels;
And Windows blinking in the sun;—
I sing the way it feels.

And if a Sparrow flies across,
I put him in the Song.—
I sing whatever happens in,
To make it last for long.

I sing about the things I think
Of almost everything.
Sometimes I don’t know what to Think
—Till I begin to Sing.

— Illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green for The Book of the Little Past (1910) by Josephine Preston Peabody; posted for Kim Parent, who sings like an angel.