Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/541

 big as your bodies, and fangs for teeth! Confound you!"

The ground all around him was littered with wild caricature sketches of all sorts of persons—the stable-boy who brought his food, Mr. G himself, and his friends and others.

"There, sir," said Mr. G "that's what I'm preparing for them: that's the rod I have in pickle! My private caricaturist, sir; Sally and the rest of us have one each,"

"But what do you purpose to do with him?" I asked.

"Do with him?" said Mr. G. "Why, set him on to the caricaturists of the papers who caricature me, of course; to rend them—pictorially—limb from limb."

"But why do you keep him chained up?"

"To make him savage, of course. Sometimes we keep him without food for a day or two, and then his productions are severe, I can tell you—every one of us comes out as a demon, with horn and a pitchfork. Regularly every morning we tickle him with straws, trow pepper over him to make him sneeze, and make faces at him; and when he really is vexed he's a sight to see. Just come outside, and I'll show you a dummy of the first number of the new magazine we intend to bring out—The Retaliator."

It was some weeks after the foregoing occurrences that I was conversing with an eminent caricaturist, when the servant announced that a gentleman wished to speak with him. On the visitor being shown up, I could not help a feeling of recognition which told me that I had seen him before, although I could not remember where. He had come to interview the eminent caricaturist; and, while he conversed persuasively with him and drew him out, I observed that he kept a glittering eye fixed penetratingly upon the object of his interview; nothing about my friend the caricaturist seemed to escape him; and when at length he arose with an air of triumph, and retired towards the door, he suddenly whipped out a small sketch-book and dashed in a rapid sketch of the eminent one.

"Going to put my portrait in too?" asked the latter. The appalling intensity of the gleam in the visitor's eye absolutely held me spellbound, as he hissed "Yes!" then he was gone. Then at last a revelation flashed upon me, and a tear rose to my eye as I thought of the fate of my acquaintance the caricaturist—the fate, hanging, like an invisible sword, over his yet unconscious head; and, when I bade him good-bye a short time after, I felt that I was squeezing his hand in silent sympathy. I could not bring myself to tell him the awful truth; it would have choked me.

Next week the first number of The Retaliator appeared, and in its midst a fearful caricature of my acquaintance the eminent caricaturist.

Instantly I hurried to his studio to learn the worst, and found him lying back in an