ring
the figures and indeed everything else, so as not in any way to trench
upon the great artist's copyright) was dogged by a detective, arrested,
and finally thrown into the darkest dungeon beneath the Burlington House
moat! Protest was useless. What his terror must have been my pen fails
to describe. Visions of the thumbscrew, the rack, and all the tortures
conceivable rose in the fertile imagination of my colleague, and beads
of perspiration made their appearance upon his massive brow. After weary
hours, when lunch-time without the lunch had come and gone, and the
pangs of hunger began to be added to his other miseries, when he was
reflecting that his week's work for _Punch_ was yet unfinished, that the
engravers would be in despair at not having it in time, and that at that
moment his editor was probably telegraphing to him all over London and
instituting a search for his person all over his club, suddenly the
bolts of his prison-chamber were withdrawn and his gaoler, the
blood-thirsty tyrant Red Tape, allowed the genial artist to return to
the bosom of his wife and family--not, however, without leaving a
hostage behind him. The sketch--the guilty sketch--the cause of all his
troubles, was detained. In vain the harassed artist explained to his
grim Cerberus that the work was wanted for the next week's issue of
_Punch_, and although as a matter of fact it duly appeared at the
appointed time, Mr. Sambourne had to trust to his memory instead of to
the courtesy and common sense of Burlington House for the reproduction
of his skit.

I remember another incident which will serve to illustrate the trials
and misfortunes of the caricaturist when pursuing his vocation outside
the walls of his studio. It was the opening day of the New Gallery, and
as I draw my sketches of the pictures with an ordinary pen and liquid
Indian ink direct, and have them afterwards, like all my drawings,
photographed on wood and engraved--of late years they are reproduced by
process engraving--I was holding my bottle of ink and my sketch-book in
one hand, while my pen was busy with the other. Upon arriving very early
in the morning I thought I must have made a mistake, and that I had
entered a manufactory of hats, for the hall was almost entirely taken up
with hat-boxes. Upon enquiry, however, I learned that these merely
contained the new hats in which the directors would, later on, receive
their visitors. When the hall began to fill, and the fashi