sked the
excitable-looking stranger the nature of his business. Pulling from his
pocket a roll of one-pound Irish bank-notes, he thrust them into my
hand, and besought me at the same time not to refuse the request he was
about to make. An idea flashed through my mind that perhaps he had seen
me coming out of the offices of the National Press, and had jumped to
the conclusion that I could therefore be bought over to perpetrate some
terrible political crime. I even imagined that in the roll of notes I
should find the knife with which the fell deed had to be done. Seeing
that I shrank from him, he seized hold of my arm, and, in a most
pitiable voice, said:

"Don't, young sorr, refuse me what I am about to ask you. I'm only a
working man, but here are all my savings, which you may take if you will
just dhraw me a picter to be placed at the top of a complete set of
photographs of our Irish leaders. I want Britannia at the head of the
group, a bastely dhrunken old hag, wid her fut on the throat of the
beautiful Erin, who is to be bound hand and fut wid chains, and being
baten and starved. Thin I want prisons at the sides, showing the grand
sons of Ould Oireland dying in their cells by torture, whilst a fine
Oirish liberator wid dhrawn sword is just on the point of killing
Britannia outright, and so saving his disthressful country."

About this time someone had been good enough to inform me that all black
and white artists are in the habit of engraving their own work, and,
religiously believing this, I duly provided myself with some engraving
tools, bought some boxwood, a jeweller's eye-glass, and a sand bag,
without which no engraver's table can be said to be complete.

Then, setting to work to practise the difficult art, I struggled on as
best I could, until one fine day a professional engraver enlightened me
upon the matter. I need scarcely say he went into fits of laughter when
I told him that every artist was expected to be a Bewick, and he pointed
out to me that not only do artists as a rule know very little about
engraving, but in addition they have often only a limited knowledge of
how to draw for engravers.

However, thinking I should better understand the difficulties of drawing
for publishers if I first mastered the technical art of reproduction,
with the assistance of the engraver aforesaid I rapidly acquired
sufficient dexterity with the tools to engrave my own drawings, and this
I continued to do until I left