Action serves as frequent subject throughout the book, with characters usually depicted at the height of (usually uncontrolled) movement: recoiling, reacting, or simply being tossed about by more powerful forces. Frost frequently makes use of quick lines to indicate dust clouds, splashing water, explosions. He never uses purely iconographic lines to indicate movement, but his mostly-outdoor settings with their dirt roads and local water offer sufficient pretext for the kinds of images that would develop, in others' hands, into motion lines and other devices.

It is worth noting a collection of pages under the rubric of "Nonsense," each presenting two images separated by a limerick composed by Frost's brother Charles. The paired images interact with the text to offer something more than simple before-and-after shots. Usually the top image is a larger, commanding image with a fuller sense of setting, and often depicting some kind of anticipated movement. The interposed limerick proceeds to more fully explain the scene, and then to whimsically recount the anticipated consequences inherent in the first picture; the action is often left to the reader's imagination with the subsequent image depicting the aftermath.  The formulation is not strict, but it more or less applies to many of the examples. A notable example on page 74 makes narrative use of the vertically stacked images: Frost draws a cat about to leap upon a pudding set out to cool on a window-sill. "He was grieved and surprised / When the dish all capsized / And so was the party below;" the second panel depicts a previously unseen character doing some washing beneath the window, and plunged into the basin along with the aggrieved cat.