Miss Dot at the Railroad Gates

This four-panel strip follows Miss Dot's encounter with a railroad gateman who teaches her essential safety rules. The narrative unfolds through speech balloons and sequential images: Dot admits she could crawl under the gates but won't; the gateman explains the three warning toots of the train whistle and the signal to put on brakes; he clarifies that two long and two short toots mean "clear the track"; finally, Dot demonstrates her learning by stopping and listening before crossing. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic conventions—recurring child characters, practical instruction woven into entertainment, and the visual grammar of panels and captions that defined comics' emergence as a distinct medium in the 1910s.