An illustration from The Last Voyage by Baroness Annie Brassey (1889).

You've heard of magic dust, woofle dust, pixie dust, fairy dust, and foo foo powder, but these aren't mere figures of speech, as we see in the Catalogue of Sharp & Smith, 1889, p. 670 — a genuine magic atomizer.

"It was the cat": an illustration from A Tramp Abroad by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1880).

Here's a precursor to Number Six and the iconic penny farthing of the cult television series The Prisoner.  From Two Trips to the Emerald Isle by 'Faed' (1888).  The caption reads: "Decimal Six."

The majestic front of eternity has vanished and left only ephemeral time (to paraphrase James Henry Snowden).

This one is from Punch, 1889.

"The Process of Wakenin": an illustration from Legal and other Lyrics by George Outram, illustrated by William Ralston (1887).

Who is the biggest?  The man, most people would say.  But the man is really the smallest, and the little girl is the biggest.  We find proof in a perspective illusion from The Book of Knowledge (1912, pictured right).

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.  The caption reads: "Billings adjusted the glass to his eye and looked again. 'By Jove, it's a horse-race!'"

An illustration from an 1883 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.

"A man shot by a rabbit," from Peter Penniless: Gamekeeper and Gentleman by George Christopher Davies, 1884.

"Am I to understand that you have nothing more to say to me?"  No news is good news in The Quiver, 1882.

"Nothing very exciting to-day": no news is good news in The Quiver, 1883.

"What do the bells say?"  Is the older sibling teaching the younger to count by listening to a distant clock tower, or are the parents conducting a seance in the parlor, the spirit bells shooing away the sandman?  (Guess which one we think it is!)  From Little Wide Awake: An Illustrated Magazine for Good Children, 1881.

"St. Valehtine's [sic] Prisoner," from Pleasant Hours, 1888.

An illustration from The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle (1887).  The caption reads: "The Princess looks into that which she should not have done."

An illustration from an 1887 issue of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly magazine.  The caption reads: "In exchange for a Soul."

"The Unseen World."  An illustration from an 1880 issue of Punch magazine.