sketch book. Faithfully
yours,

Harry Furniss.
Garrick Club, London, July, 1892.]

Major Pond is a typical American, hospitable, kind, with an eye for
business, but I do not appear in his entertaining book, nor was I ever
on his business books either. He sat for me on the shoeblack's street
chair outside his office when I made a sketch of him, and he was so
obliging I believe he would have stood on his head if I had asked him.
He managed to get me to stand in front of the camera, but not in front
of an audience.

Some day I shall write a paper entitled "Photographers I Have Met," for
few people have faced the fire of the camera oftener than I. I am not a
fashionable beauty, nor much of a celebrity, neither am I honestly a
vain man--I shrink from the rays of the too truthful lens--but I have
been dragged into the line of fire and held there until the deed is
done, like an unwilling convict. In nearly every town I have visited
have I undergone this operation, and the result is a collection of
criminal-looking, contorted countenances of a description seldom seen
outside the museum of a police station.

[Illustration: MAJOR POND.]

I was therefore determined not to incur this risk in America.
Photographers sent their cards, but they saw me not (perhaps if they
had they would have repented of their invitation). However, one day I
was secured by stratagem.

I was walking along Union Square with Major Pond, whose martial bearing
impressed me as much as his 'cuteness fascinated me. He had that morning
heard of my determination not to be photographed, and as he walked along
he suddenly stepped into a doorway, his arm in mine, touched a button in
a side panel, down rushed an elevator, the door was flung open, and I
was flung in. "Sarony," said the Major, and up, up, up we flew.

"The photographer?" I asked hurriedly.

"The artist," the Major replied; "one of the greatest flesh drawers"
(nude studies) "we have in this gr--e--a--t country, sir. Here he is,
deaf to everything but art, and to everyone but artists."

Who can say photography is not high art when you have to go up seven
stories to it?

I now stood before the greatest photographer in the world--and the
smallest. I stood--he danced. He talked--I listened.

"Come here," he cried; "you are an artist--you can understand
genius--you can appreciate my work."

And he produced from a portfolio a quantity of studies, or, as the Major
would call them, "flesh drawi