The alphabet according to "Cousin Sarah's" Stories for Children

A celebration of reading and books, with a line from a great New Year's wish (Cloud image from sample included in Paint Shop Pro 7)

A bit of a joke piece based on a certain painting in which the real object is pasted onto the canvas next to its painted image. With the passage of time, it's gotten easier to tell which is which, as the pasted object has degraded while the painted image is pristine -- an inadvertent tribute to art as a record of the perishable. Here, a "painted" image of a perfect cover of Parley's Magazine contrasts with the hard-used original; a "painted" fragment from a "newspaper article" explains the gimmick: "... the artist asks, 'What is truth?' A cover from Parley's magazine is pasted beside a painting of it, as alike as twins. To guess which is the image and which the true cover would puzzle even the artist."

John Dunn Hunter & his Memoirs, with images of the Osage River & of mid-Missouri grasses (photographed by the owner of the web site)

Look long enough, & you'll find pictures that mirror photos -- or, vice versa. Amusingly, most of the photographs postdate their twins, implying that sometimes life does imitate art. Many of the illustrations are from Nancy Sproat's Ditties for Children.

A marvelous pen & ink trompe l'oeil drawn in 1830 by a 19-year-old

The American Civil War: Liberty triumphant
"Old Abe, the War Eagle," ex-slaves, Union soldiers, & celebration, with a quote from Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator attacked on the floor of the Senate by a cane-wielding Southern senator who took issue with some of Sumner's remarks