But then they get tricky.  There is a post-card with a stamp upside down.  Well, what’s wrong with that?  Certainly there is no affront to nature in a stamp upside down.  Neither is there in a man’s looking through the large end of a telescope if he wants to.  You can’t arbitrarily say at the top of the page, “Mark the thing that is wrong,” and then have a picture of a house with one window larger than all the others and expect any one to agree with you that it is necessarily wrong.  It may look queer, but so does the whole picture.  You can’t tell; the big window may open from a room that needs a big window.  I am not going to stultify myself by making things wrong about which I know none of the facts.  Who am I that I should condemn a man for looking through the large end of a telescope?  Personally, I like to look through the large end of a telescope.  It only shows the state of personal liberty in this country when a picture of a man looking at a ship through the large end of a telescope is held before the young and branded as “wrong.”

* * * * *

Arguing these points with yourself takes up quite a bit of time and you get so out of patience with the man that made up the examination that you lose all heart in it.

Then come some pictures about which I am frankly in the dark.  There is a Ford car with a rather funny-looking mud-guard, but who can pick out any one feature of a Ford and say that it is wrong?  It may look wrong but I’ll bet that the car in this picture as it stands could pass many a big car on a hill.

Then there is a boy holding a bat, and while his position isn’t all that a coach could ask, the only radically wrong thing that I can detect about the picture is that he is evidently playing baseball in a clean white shirt with a necktie and a rather natty cap set perfectly straight on his head.  It is true he has his right thumb laid along the edge of the bat, but maybe he likes to bunt that way.  There is something in the picture that I don’t get, I am afraid, just as there is in the picture of two men playing golf.  One is about to putt.  Aside from the fact that his putter seems just a trifle long, I should have to give up my guess and take my defeat like a man.

But I do refuse to concede anything on Picture No. 22.  Here a baby is shown sitting on the floor.  He appears to be about a year and a half old.  Incidentally, he is a very plain baby.  Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with.  There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates.  Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.

The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child.  I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with.  They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable.  Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical.  I suppose that the author of this test would insist on calling a picture wrong which showed a baby with a safety-razor in his hand or an overshoe on his head, and yet a photograph of the Public Library could not be more true to life.