seph Swain also transferred his services. In due course
the young engraver left that establishment, and had not long been on
the look-out for a satisfactory opening when he received from Jewett the
little commission which landed him in a very short time in the service
of _Punch_, in which he remained until he retired from business in
favour of his son, after a completed period of half a century.

For some years Mr. Swain remained at the head of the _Punch_ engraving
department, devoting himself, and his six or eight assistants,
exclusively to _Punch_ work. He then pointed out to the proprietors how,
by conducting and extending the business on his own account, he could
carry out their work more economically while increasing his own field of
operations and doubling his earning powers. The suggestion was acted
upon, and the result proved satisfactory to both parties. For by this
time he had educated the necessary engravers to that style of facsimile
cutting in which he himself, and but few besides, had been specially
trained, and he was enabled to keep the weekly expense of engraving
_Punch_ down to an average of under thirty pounds, and at the same time
to spend his superfluous energies on many of the most famous illustrated
books of his day.

For many years the boxwood blocks on which the drawings were made
consisted of a single piece; for, as already explained, Charles Wells of
Bouverie Street, at first a cabinetmaker of rare excellence, and later
on a boxwood importer, had not then invented the device which
revolutionised newspaper illustration--that of making a block in six or
more sections which could be taken apart after the drawing had been made
(and later on photographed) upon its surface and distributed among the
engravers, and then screwed together again when each man had completed
his own little piece. The invention which led to such an economy of time
was only introduced in 1860 or thereabouts. For nineteen years _Punch_
had to see his big blocks cut on a single piece of wood, which was one
of the reasons why the earlier cartoons and "pencillings" were, as a
rule, so much more roughly drawn and hastily cut. In those early days a
single "round" of wood was used--a "round" that had been cross-cut from
the trunk of the tree. This was always kept seasoning until by natural
shrinkage it had split up to the centre, when a tongue-shaped piece of
box was fitted into the triangular vacancy and screwed firmly through.