We all became specialised, so to speak, and divided Leech’s vast domain among us.

We kicked a little at first, I remember, and whenever (to continue the musical simile) I could get in a comic song, or what I thought one, or some queer fantastic ditty about impossible birds and beasts and fishes and what not, I did not let the opportunity slip; while Keene, who had a very fine falsetto on the top of his chest register, would now and then warble, pianissimo, some little ballad of the drawing-room or nursery.

Illustration:  FELINE AMENITIES

But gradually we settled into our respective grooves, and I have grown to like my little groove very much, narrow though it be—­a poor thing, but mine own!

“I_wish_ you hadn’t asked Captain Wareham, Lizzie.  Horrid man!  I can’t bear him!”

“Dear me, Charlotte—­isn’t the world big enough for you both?”

“Yes; but your little Dining-room isn’t!”—­Punch, February 16, 1889.]

Moreover, certain physical disabilities that I have the misfortune to labour under make it difficult for me to study and sketch the lusty things in the open air and sunshine.  My sight, besides being defective in many ways, is so sensitive that I cannot face the common light of day without glasses thickly rimmed with wire gauze, so that sketching out of doors is often to me a difficult and distressing performance.  That is also partly why I am not a sportsman and a delineator of sport.

I mention this infirmity not as an excuse for my shortcomings and failures—­for them there is no excuse—­but as a reason why I have abstained from the treatment of so much that is so popular, delightful, and exhilarating in English country 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.