ng writer hung
his own ideas. He discussed "a rendezvous in the Rockies," remote from
the centre of civilisation, as surely an appropriate locale for a
train-scuttling speciality or a fight to a death finish between Roaring
Gore and Wild Whiskers. A pair of athletes, scienced to the tips of
their vibrating digits, compelled to appeal to the courtesy of a wild
and well-whiskered Legislature, would doubtless appear inconsistent to
gentlemen of the National Sporting Club of London, who were anxious to
have the big fight settled within earshot of Bow Bells, in the luxurious
rooms of the London National Sporting Club. One combatant, I declared,
"swallowed the gruel rammed at him as if it were mother's milk," the
lads "had enough blood on tap to run a sizeable slaughterhouse"; then a
British fighter "swallowing a lobster salad on top of a whiskey sour,
with a dose of prussic acid by way of dessert"; and references to my
knowledge of the "Freds," "Toms," or "Dicks" of the Sporting Press of
London, and to my familiarity with "Charlies," "Fitzs," and "Jims" of
the "Magic Circle," were astounding.

My manager rushed into my rooms with the paper in question. "This will
ruin your prospects here! We depend on the women folk; they will never
come to hear you after reading this!" And so it was. In spite of other
interviewers at Washington writing of me as "an English good fellow,
rich and juicy, and genial in flavour, like other hot stuffs of that
remarkable country"; and another,

"Harry Furniss' eclipse of the gayety of John Bull, with facile
pencil and brilliant tongue, attracted a cultured assemblage to the
Columbia Theatre. Furniss, a plump lump of a man, all curves from
pumps to poll, in gesture and in the breezy flourish of his
sentences, genially cynical like Voltaire, cuts an engaging figure
in his black coat that he wears with the inborn grace of a
well-dined Londoner, a bon vivant, whose worldly shaft tickles and
never bites, for he is a gentleman whose wit wins and never wounds.
Furniss is Thackeray in the satirist's mellow moments, and there is
no little of the Thackerian spirit radiating in the pictures of
this rotund and quaint little caricaturist."

I did very bad business in Washington, largely due to bad management.
Five o'clock teas had become the rage of Washington Society, and my
appearances in the theatre were between 4.15 and 6 o'clock in the
afternoon. A