untry life. If there had
been no Charles Keene (a terrible supposition both for _Punch_ and its
readers), I should have done my best to illustrate the lower walks and
phases of London existence, which attracts me as much as any other. It
is just as easy to draw a costermonger or a washerwoman as it is a
gentleman or lady--perhaps a little easier--but it is by no means so
easy to draw them as Keene did! And to draw a cab or an omnibus after
him (though I have sometimes been obliged to do so) is almost tempting
Providence!

If there had been no Charles Keene, I might, perhaps, with practice,
have become a funny man myself--though I do not suppose that my fun
would have ever been of the broadest.

Before I became an artist I was considered particularly good at
caricaturing my friends, who always foresaw for me more than one
change of profession, and _Punch_ as the final goal of my wanderings
in search of a career. For it was originally intended that I should be
a man of science.

Dr. Williamson, the eminent chemist and professor of chemistry, told
me not long ago that he remembers caricatures that I drew, now forty
years back, when I was studying under him at the Laboratory of
Chemistry at University College, and that he and other grave and
reverend professors were hugely tickled by them at the time. Indeed,
he remembers nothing else about me, except that I promised to be a
very bad chemist.

I was a very bad chemist indeed, but not for long! As soon as I was
free to do as I pleased, I threw up test-tubes and crucibles and went
back to Paris, where I was born and brought up, and studied to become
an artist in M. Gleyre's studio. Then I went to Antwerp, where there
is a famous school of painting, and where I had no less a person than
Mr. Alma-Tadema as a fellow-student. It was all delightful, but
misfortune befell me, and I lost the sight of one eye--perhaps it was
the eye with which I used to do the funny caricatures; it was a very
good eye, much the better of the two, and the other has not improved
by having to do a double share of the work.

And then in time I came to England and drew for _Punch_, thus
fulfilling the early prophecy of my friends and fellow-students at
University College--though not quite in the sense they anticipated.

[Illustration: THE NEW SOCIETY CRAZE

THE NEW GOVERNESS (_through her pretty nose_). "Waall--I come right
slick away from Ne'York City, an' I ain't had much time for foolin'
arou