Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/183

 weeks." After this he came to London and found himself on Blackfriars Bridge on the last occasion but one on which the Lord Mayor proceeded to Westminster by water. "Evening," he said, "found me still on the bridge, and I fell asleep on one of the side enclosures which were a feature of the old structure. Suddenly I was awakened by a stentorian voice sounding in my ear. 'A cold berth, this, my friend.' It was the voice of a recruiting sergeant, who not unkindly sat down beside me. 'Come,' he urged, seeing that I was shivering; 'I'm going for a hot meal. Come with me.' I went, and joined the army." In his later years the old poet wrote verses, chiefly about children and home, which had a wide vogue.

Mr. Robert Leighton recalls the association between Cassell's and the Whitefriars Club, of which many of their editors, a large proportion of their contributors, and not a few of the authors for whom they have published, have been members. "In conversation over lunch and at dinner, or round the club fire, a member or his guest would say something betraying a special knowledge of some particular subject, and afterwards (for business was never obtruded into the social communion) he would be buttonholed by an editor or receive a letter asking him to write a book or an article on that subject. As an instance, I remember that William Senior had written a graphic article in the Daily News about the wreck of the North-fleet. John Williams recognized the hand, and asked him to write a book on 'Notable Shipwrecks.' That, I think, was Senior's first book. Then, I myself one day," Mr. Leighton proceeds, "happened to say at lunch that I had just come from Cruft's Dog Show, where I had won a prize for one of my terriers. Sir Arthur Spurgeon, who was present, discovered that I knew a good deal about dogs, and he led the talk on to a discussion of existing books on the subject. I argued that they were mostly out of date, that even Vero Shaw's 'Book of the Dog' was not of great use, since so many new canine breeds had become fashionable and so many old ones had become