ough the agency of friends of his father, he
set sail for Boston, where an opening had been made for him in the big
dry-goods house of Jordan, Marsh & Co.

But business was not his forte. He spent all his leisure time in painting
pictures, which he found, moreover, he could sell very readily. He burned
for the more artistic atmosphere of the city by the Thames, and,
encouraged by his success in disposing of his paintings, he threw up his
mercantile job and departed for London.

And now began for him seven memorable years--years of keen disappointment,
of deep bitterness, of hope deferred, of actual suffering in body as well
as mind. The kind of pictures he had been able to sell with ease in Boston
found no buyers in England, and matters went speedily with him from bad to
worse.

The incident he had used in his play "Monsieur," of his hero's engagement
to play the piano and toppling from the stool through weakness induced by
hunger, is drawn from his own experience. The episode occurred at a
concert-hall, when he was possessed of only one suit of clothes and no
home.

Mansfield Meets W.S. Gilbert.

It was his ability to play and sing that really kept his body and soul
together in these awful days and nights, for once in a while, by a clutch
at the fringe of friendships left him from the old days, he could obtain
an engagement to entertain a company of literary or stage folk. He fell in
with W.S. Gilbert on one of these occasions. "Pinafore" had just taken the
public by storm, and the makers thereof were hastening to utilize the
wave of popular favor by thrusting all of their available wares to a ride
upon its crest.

"I think that young man will do for _Wellington Wells_ in 'The Sorcerer,'"
Gilbert remarked to his manager, R. D'Oyly Carte.

It was to be a company for the provinces, and as Mr. Carte thought that
the rather shabbily attired young person who officiated at the piano would
not be exorbitant in his demands for salary, he decided that he would do,
and offered Mansfield three pounds, or fifteen dollars, a week.

To the out-at-elbows, fate-buffeted artist, this seemed a princely sum,
and he accepted the position with an eagerness he hoped was not as
apparent as his necessities demanded it should be. But his spine stiffened
a little later on when, having made good with _Wellington Wells_ and one
or two other impersonations in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, he
asked for a raise of salary amounting