respectable friends. Nor did my miseries end with the morning
calls. I was commanded to attend all dinner-parties, and to make

myself agreeable at all balls. The dinners were the worst trial.
Sometimes, indeed, we contrived to get ourselves asked to the

houses of high and mighty entertainers, where we ate the finest
French dishes and drank the oldest vintages, and fortified

ourselves sensibly and snugly in that way against the frigidity
of the company. Of these repasts I have no hard words to say; it

is of the dinners we gave ourselves, and of the dinners which
people in our rank of life gave to us, that I now bitterly

complain.
Have you ever observed the remarkable adherence to set forms of

speech which characterizes the talkers of arrant nonsense!
Precisely the same sheepish following of one given example

distinguishes the ordering of genteel dinners.
When we gave a dinner at home, we had gravy soup, turbot and

lobster-sauce, haunch of mutton, boiled fowls and tongue,
lukewarm oyster-patties and sticky curry for side-dishes; wild

duck, cabinet-pudding, jelly, cream and tartlets. All excellent
things, except when you have to eat them continually. We lived

upon them entirely in the season. Every one of our hospitable
friends gave us a return dinner, which was a perfect copy of

ours--just as ours was a perfect copy of theirs, last year. They
boiled what we boiled, and we roasted what they roasted. We none

of us ever changed the succession of the courses--or made more or
less of them--or altered the position of the fowls opposite the

mistress and the haunch opposite the master. My stomach used to
quail within me, in those times, when the tureen was taken off

and the inevitable gravy-soup smell renewed its daily
acquaintance with my nostrils, and warned me of the persistent

eatable formalities that were certain to follow. I suppose that
honest people, who have known what it is to get no dinner (being

a Rogue, I have myself never wanted for one), have gone through
some very acute suffering under that privation. It may be some

consolation to them to know that, next to absolute starvation,
the same company-dinner, every day, is one of the hardest trials

that assail human endurance. I date my first serious
determination to throw over the medicalprofession at the

earliest convenient opportunity, from the second season's series
of dinners at which my aspirations, as a rising physician,

unavoidably and regularly condemned me to be present.
CHAPTER II.

THE opportunity I wanted presented itself in a curious way, and
led, unexpectedly enough, to some rather important consequences.

I have already stated, among the other branches of human
attainment which I acquired at the public school, that I learned

to draw caricatures of the masters who were so obliging as to
educate me. I had a natural faculty for this useful department of

art. I improved it greatly by practice in secret after I left
school, and I ended by making it a source of profit and pocket

money to me when I entered the medicalprofession. What was I to
do? I could not expect for years to make a halfpenny, as a

physician. My genteel walk in life led me away from all immediate
sources of emolument, and my father could only afford to give me

an allowance which was too preposterously small to be mentioned.
I had helped myself surreptitiously to pocket-money at school, by

selling my caricatures, and I was obliged to repeat the process
at home!

At the time of which I write, the Art of Caricature was just
approaching the close of its colored and most extravagant stage

of development. The subtlety and truth to Nature required for the
pursuit of it now, had hardly begun to be thought of then. Sheer

farce and coarseburlesque, with plenty of color for the money,
still made up the sum of what the public of those days wanted. I

was first assured of my capacity for the production of these
requisites, by a medical friend of the ripe critical age of

nineteen. He knew a print-publisher, and enthusiastically showed
him a portfolio full of my sketches, taking care at my request

not to mention my name. Rather to my surprise (for I was too
conceited to be greatly amazed by the circumstance), the

publisher picked out a few of the best of my wares, and boldly
bought them of me-- of course, at his own price. From that time I

became, in an anonymous way, one of the young buccaneers of
British Caricature; cruising about here, there and everywhere, at

all my intervals of spare time, for any prize in the shape of a
subject which it was possible to pick up. Little did my

highly-connected mother think that, among the colored prints in
the shop-window, which disrespectfully illustrated the public and

private proceedings of distinguished individuals, certain
specimens bearing the classicsignature of "Thersites Junior,"

were produced from designs furnished by her studious and medical
son. Little did my respectable father imagine when, with great

difficulty and vexation, he succeeded in getting me now and then
smuggled, along with himself, inside the pale of fashionable

society--that he was helping me to study likenesses which were
destined under my recklesstreatment to make the public laugh at

some of his most august patrons, and to fill the pockets of his
son with professional fees, never once dreamed of in his

philosophy.
For more than a year I managed, unsuspected, to keep the Privy

Purse fairly supplied by the exercise of my caricaturing
abilities. But the day of detection was to come.

Whether my medical friend's admiration of my satirical sketches
led him into talking about them in public with too little

reserve; or whether the servants at home found private means of
watching me in my moments of Art-study, I know not: but that some

one betrayed me, and that the discovery of my illicit manufacture
of caricatures was actually communicated even to the

grandmotherly head and fount of the family honor, is a most
certain and lamentable matter of fact. One morning my father

received a letter from Lady Malkinshaw herself, informing him, in
a handwritingcrooked with poignant grief, and blotted at every

third word by the violence of virtuousindignation, that
"Thersites Junior" was his own son, and that, in one of the last

of the "ribald's" caricatures her own venerable features were
unmistakably represented as belonging to the body of a large owl!

Of course, I laid my hand on my heart and indignantly denied
everything. Useless. My original model for the owl had got proofs

of my guilt that were not to be resisted.
The doctor, ordinarily the most mellifluous and self-possessed of

men, flew into a violent, roaring, cursing passion, on this
occasion--declared that I was imperiling the honor and standing

of the family--insisted on my never drawing another caricature,
either for public or private purposes, as long as I lived; and

ordered me to go forthwith and ask pardon of Lady Malkinshaw in
the humblest terms that it was possible to select. I answered

dutifully that I was quite ready to obey, on the condition that
he should reimburse me by a trebled allowance for what I should

lose by giving up the Art of Caricature, or that Lady Malkinshaw
should confer on me the appointment of physician-in-waiting on

her, with a handsome salary attached. These extremely moderate
stipulations so increased my father's anger, that he asserted,

with an unmentionably vulgar oath, his resolution to turn me out
of doors if I did not do as he bid me, without daring to hint at

any conditions whatsoever. I bowed, and said that I would save
him the exertion of turning me out of doors, by going of my own

accord. He shook his fist at me; after which it obviously became
my duty, as a member of a gentlemanly and peacefulprofession, to

leave the room. The same evening I left the house, and I have
never once given the clumsy and expensivefootman the trouble of

answering the door to me since that time.
I have reason to believe that my exodus from home was, on the

whole, favorably viewed by my mother, as tending to remove any
possibility of my bad character and conduct interfering with my

sister's advancement in life.
By dint of angling with great dexterity and patience, under the

direction of both her parents, my handsome sister Annabella had
succeeded in catching an eligible husband, in the shape of a

wizen, miserly, mahogany-colored man, turned fifty, who had made
a fortune in the West Indies. His name was Batterbury; he had