lboy's Punch_. It sounds strangely prophetic
as I think of it now. The entire make-up of it was _a la Punch_, and it
had its cartoon every week. At that time the Davenport Cabinet Trick was
all the rage, and the very first cartoon I drew was founded on that.
Here is the picture: myself--as a schoolboy--being tied up with ropes
depictive of Greek, Latin, Euclid, and other cutting and disagreeable
items. I am placed in the cabinet--the school. The head-master, whom I
flattered very much in the drawing, opens another cabinet and out steps
the young student covered with glory and scholastic honours thick upon
him! From that moment my school-master spoiled me. I left school and
started work. I got a pound for my first drawing. A. M. Sullivan started
a paper in Ireland on very similar lines to _Punch_. There was a wave in
Ireland of better class journalism at this time which had never existed
before or since. I slipped in. For some years I drew on wood and
engraved my own work. I was given to understand that all black and white
men engraved their own efforts, so I offered myself as an apprentice to
an engraver.

"He said: 'Don't come as an apprentice. If you will undertake to look
after my office, I'll teach you the art of engraving.'"

It meant a hard struggle for young Furniss. He was loaded down with
clerical work, but in his own little room, when the day's labours were
done, he would sit up till two and three in the morning. There was no
quenching his earnestness. Work then with him was a real desire. It is
so to-day. To rest is obnoxious to him.

He worked away. The feeling in Ireland against Englishmen at that time
was very strong. Tom Taylor, then the editor of _Punch_, saw some of his
sketches in Dublin, and advised him to go to the West of Ireland to make
studies of character. He was in Galway, and he had persuaded a number of
Irishmen who were breaking stones to pause in their work and let him
sketch them. They consented. The overseer came up.

"What d'yer mane," he cried, "allowing this hathen Saxon to draw yer?"

"I've never been out of Ireland in my life," said the artist; but the
overseer had seized him, and but for the intervention of the men, whom
he had paid liberally for the "sitting," he would have thrown him into
the river.

Then a great trouble came. His father was stricken with blindness. The
young man came to London, and with something more than the proverbial
half-crown in his pocket. He was nine