Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/576
and let him sketch them. They consented. The overseer came up.
"What d'yer mane," he cried, "allowing this hathen Saxon to draw yer?"
"I've never been out of Ireland in my life," said the artist; but the overseer had seized him, and but for the intervention of the men, whom he had paid liberally for the "sitting," he would have thrown him into the river.
Then a great trouble came. His father was stricken with blindness. The young man came to London, and with something more than the proverbial half-crown in his pocket. He was nineteen years of age when he hurried out of Euston Station one morning and stood for a moment thinking—for he did not know a soul in the Metropolis. But he soon found an opportunity.
My. Furniss on "Rhoda."
From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry.
"My first work was on London Society, for Florence Marryat," he said; "then for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. The Illustrated London News employed me. I did such things as the Boat Race, Eton and Harrow cricket match, and similar subjects—all from a humorous point of view. I have had as many as three full pages in one number. Then came that terrible distress in the mining districts. I was married that year. I was sent away to "do" the Black Country, and well remember eating the first Christmas dinner of my married life alone in a Sheffield hotel.
"Those sketches were never published. They were too terribly real. The people dying in rooms with scarcely a stick of furniture, the children opening the cupboards and showing them bare, appealed to me, and my pencil refused to depict anything else. It was the same kind of thing that was afterwards made notorious by Sims and Barnard in "How the Poor Live." I came back and was selected to do some electioneering work for the same paper. This necessitated the putting off of a little dinner party to some friends, and I wired one of the invited to that effect. When I was starting, imagine my surprise to meet a Graphic artist on the platform, and to hear that my friend had unwisely given away the contents of my telegram! However, we chummed up. He stayed with friends—I at an hotel. I sat up all that night working after attending the meetings. At four o'clock I heard a knock at the door. A journalist. I was just about to put into my picture the large figures. I made him very much at home, and told him I would give him any information I knew as to the previous night's proceedings if he would act as my model. He did. We worked on till breakfast time, and we sat down together. I sent off my page—it was in a week before the Graphic! It was a good return. I had started on the Tuesday, got home on the Thursday, and never had my boots off the whole time! I'd rather keep my boots on for a week than disappoint an editor."
Punch!
I asked Mr. Furniss if Tom Taylor helped him to any considerable extent. Oh dear, no. Tom Taylor wrote a terrible fist, spattered the page all over with ink, and invariably replied on the back of the letter sent him. At least, it was so in Mr. Furniss's case. He would send sketches to Punch; they were acknowledged as "unsuitable." They invariably turned up a week or so later—the idea