nd in Europe--you bet! So I can't fix up your Gals in the Eu-
ropean languages, no-how!"

BELGRAVIAN MAMMA: (_who knows there's a Duke or two still left in the
Matrimonial Market_). "Oh, that's of no consequence. I want my
Daughters to aquire the American Accent in all its purity--and the
Idioms, and all that. Now I'm sure _you_ will do _admirably_!"--
_Punch_, December 1, 1888.]

I will not attempt a description of my work--it is so recent and has
been so widely circulated that it should be unnecessary to do so. If
you do not remember it, it is that it is not worth remembering; if you
do, I can only entreat you to be to my faults a little blind, and to
my virtues very kind!

I have always tried as honestly and truthfully as lies in me to serve
up to the readers of _Punch_ whatever I have culled with the bodily
eye, after cooking it a little in the brain. My raw material requires
more elaborate working than Leech's. He dealt more in flowers and
fruits and roots, if I may express myself so figuratively--from the
lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
themselves! Or even each other!

And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.

Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
pootiness.

But indeed for me--speaking as an arti