rebuff. I began to send contributions to periodicals
when I was fourteen years old, and a boy at Hanwell College. _Fun_ was
the first journal I favoured with my effusions, and week after week I
had a sinking at the heart as I bought that popular periodical and
searched in vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my smart
paragraphs.

It took me thirteen years to get something printed and paid for, but I
succeeded at last, and it was _Fun_, my early love, that first took me
by the hand. When I was on the staff of _Fun_, and its columns were open
to me for all I cared to write, I used often to look over the batch of
boyish efforts that littered the editor's desk, and let my heart go out
to the writers who were suffering the pangs that I had known so well.

[Illustration: MR. SIMS'S 'LITTLE DAWG']

I had had effusions of mine printed before that, but I didn't get any
money for them. I had the pleasure of seeing my signature more than once
in the columns of certain theatrical journals, in the days when I was a
constant first-nighter, and a determined upholder of the privileges of
the pit. And I even had some of my poetry printed. In the old box to
which I have gone in search of the first edition of my first book, there
are two papers carefully preserved, because they were once my pride and
glory. One is a copy of the _Halfpenny Journal_, and the other is a copy
of the _Halfpenny Welcome Guest_. On the back page of the correspondence
column of the former there is a poem signed 'G. R. S.,' addressed to a
young lady's initials in affectionately complimentary terms. Alas! I
don't know what has become of that young lady. Probably she is married,
and is the mother of a fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten
that I ever wrote verses in her honour. I think I sent her a copy of the
_Halfpenny Journal_, but a few weeks after a coldness sprang up between
us. She was behind the counter of a confectioner's shop in Camden Town,
and I found her one afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine who
used to buy his butterscotch there. My friend and I had words, but
between myself and that fair confectioner 'the rest was silence.'

[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM]

I was really very much distressed that my pride compelled me never again
to cross the threshold of that establishment. There wasn't a
confectioner's in all Camden Town that could come within measurable
distance of it for strawberry ices.

In the correspon