Through the skillful use of marks, Robert delineates different spaces of short grass and tall wheat, with the abandoned crutch occupying the boundary between the two. Where is the patient who used and needed the crutch? Has he been mysteriously healed by the presence of nature? Or has he passed on, with the tall grasses symbolizing a supernatural gateway to another realm of existence?

Here Robert’s plain magazine style of illustration is so at odds with the mystical element of the content that it produces a double-take in the viewer. Freud termed this feeling of the familiar becoming strange as “uncanny.”