n there arrived a venerable dowager in a gorgeous
canary-coloured chariot, attended by her two colossal footmen. She
sailed into the gallery, which, fortunately for the old and scant of
breath, was on the ground floor, and slightly raising the pince-nez on
her aristocratic nose, looked about her with an air of bewilderment.
Then going up to my secretary she said, "Surely! these are not by
Gainsborough?"

"No, madam," was the reply. "This is the Gainsborough Gallery, but the
pictures are by Harry Furniss."

Almost fainting on the spot, the old lady called for her salts, her
stick, and her attendants three, and was rapidly driven away from the
scene of her lamentable mistake.

The public attendance at the "The Artistic Joke" was prodigious from the
first. Even upon the private view day, when I introduced a novelty, and
instead of inviting everybody who is somebody to pay a gratuitous visit
to the show, raised the entrance fee to half-a-crown, the fashionable
crowd besieged the doors from an early hour, and made a very
considerable addition to my treasury. Those of my readers, however, who
did not pay a visit to the Gainsborough will be better able to realise
the amount of patronage we received, notwithstanding the numerous
attractions of the "Jubilee" London season, if I relate an incident
which occurred on the Saturday after we opened. It was the "private
view" of the Grosvenor Gallery, and the crowd was immense. Indeed, many
ladies and gentlemen were returning to their carriages without going
through the rooms, not, like my patron the dowager, because they were
disappointed at not finding the work of the old masters, but because the
visitors were too numerous and the atmosphere too oppressive. As I
passed through the people I heard a lady who was stepping into her
carriage say to a friend, "I have just come from 'The Artistic Joke,'
and the crowd is even worse there. They have had to close the doors
because the supply of catalogues was exhausted." This soon caused me to
quicken my pace, and hastening down the street to my own Exhibition, I
found the police standing at the doors and the people being turned away.
The simple explanation of this was that so great had been the public
demand that the stock of catalogues furnished by the printers was
exhausted early in the afternoon, and as it was quite impossible to
understand the caricatures without a catalogue, there was no alternative
but to close the doors until some m