Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/46

18 father of the transaction, he did not appear to conceive a high idea of my powers as a salesman.

Over the entrance to the Repository was a room, a kind of supplementary office, the walls of which I covered with charcoal drawings, enlarged from Retsch’s outlines. Here in the winter months, after closing hours, I painted heads of our workmen and others by gaslight. I made a little money by getting a portrait or two now and then, or drawing diagrams for a cousin of mine, J.M. Ashley, who, now in the Church, was then lecturer on chemistry at the Polytechnic close by — an innocent place of entertainment, combining amusement with instruc- tion, the frequenters of which found pleasure in “the exhibition of the diver and the diving-bell,” or “General Paisley’s plan of exploding gunpowder under water by means of sunken vessels, to be shown below.” Many paid a shilling a head for the delight of descending in the diving-bell, or would throw halfpence to the diver, who, as he rose to the surface of the water, tapped his huge helmet with them in token of their recovery. People were perhaps simpler in those days. As yet they were ignorant of the intellectual pleasure and refined humour developed by the music-hall — “Most music-’al, most melancholy,” as poor Planché used to say. When about seventeen, I was desirous of attending an art school of an evening, if such