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Comic strip · original lettering, 1905
Little Nemo in Slumberland: Snow in His Room
Winsor McCay·New York Herald, 1905·12 lines
Nemo wakes to find it snowing indoors. The snow rises past his chin, so he tunnels through it towards his father’s room and comes out somewhere else entirely: the Valley of Silence, where several polar bears are asleep and must not be woken.
Two levels on one page
The speech balloons are short and plain, about A2. The story printed underneath further down is written newspaper English from 1905 and is a good deal harder. Read the balloons first and stop there if that is enough for today. The rest will still be here.
The harder layer
The story printed underneath
Under the panels the paper ran the story in words, in small type. It is the same night as the balloons above, told by a grown-up who finds the whole thing charming, and it is much harder English. Read the comic first.
0:00
BetaAudio read-along is new, and we’re still fine-tuning the word-by-word timing, so a word may drift now and then.
After trying every known scheme to keep warm and rest comfortably, and failing, Nemo opened his eyes. The scene which presented itself to him astonished him so that he hesitated to believe he was seeing straightly. A snow storm was raging right in his very room, that threatened to swallow him up if he didn't do something at once.
Just what to do was the question, and the longer he thought about it the deeper the snow became and the more difficult for him to think. Finally he hit upon an idea but too late to carry it out, as the snow was now to his chin. Surprising as it may seem, Nemo was not a bit frightened. On the contrary, he was quite interested, and when he found himself enveloped completely, he cheerfully began to burrow through the drift to his Papa's room.
He must have lost his bearings, for he soon found himself in the home of Jack Frost, very much surprised. He willingly agreed to go with Snowball wherever he was ordered. The beauty of the landscape, however, severely interfered with his continuing on very far, for the reason that it attracted his attention from Snowball, who was cautioning him to keep quiet.
«Don't breathe! This is the Valley of Silence. Keep still and we'll soon be in the presence of Jack Frost, who will take us to Slumberland» whispered Snowball. But Nemo was all eyes and no ears, and the result was a delightful excursion into the grandest region ever dreamed of, was transformed into a frightful flight for home. It seems that several gigantic polar bears had, on account of the cool and silent nature of the place, decided to take a nap, contrary to the rules laid down by Mr.
Frost, and well, that's nothing to do with Nemo now. His duty is to get home. Nemo knew his duty too, and was fulfilling it with all his might when he awoke, panting.
Words light up as they are read aloud. Tap any word to see what it means and add it to your vocabulary list.
About this page
A whole page of white. McCay draws snow with almost nothing: an outline, a few dots, and the paper itself doing the rest, and then hides a boy, a guide and four polar bears inside it. It is worth switching the readable text off once and looking at the page as a drawing, because the bears only appear when you stop reading. The lettering is the hardest to make out on the whole shelf for the same reason, white on white, which is exactly why this page needed the clean type most.
Scanned page from the Internet Archive, marked Public Domain Mark 1.0. Published 1905, so copyright has expired everywhere.
Check what you remember
5 quick questions about the page. Scroll up to re-read any time.
Question 1
What does Nemo find when he opens his eyes?
Question 2
How does Nemo get out of his room?
Question 3
Why must Nemo keep quiet in the Valley of Silence?
Question 4
The caption says Nemo was all eyes and no ears. This means
Question 5
Papa asks What ails you? He means
0 of 5 answered
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