question was put to him of what use he was going to make of the
strange jumble of jest which he had thus compiled. His answer was
that he was about to turn lecturer, and that before them were the
materials of his lecture. It was then that his friends laughed at
him, and characterised him as "a fool."

"They had some right to think so," said Artemus to me as we rambled
up Euclid Street. "I half thought that I was one myself. I don't
look like a lecturer--do I?"

He was always fond, poor fellow, of joking on the subject of his
personal appearance. His spare figure and tall stature, his
prominent nose and his light-colored hair, were each made the
subject of a joke at one time or another in the course of his
lecturing career. If he laughed largely at the foibles of others,
he was equally disposed to laugh at any shortcomings he could detect
in himself. If anything at all in his outward form was to him a
source of vanity, it was the delicate formation of his hands.
White, soft, long, slender, and really handsome, they were more like
the hands of a high-born lady than those of a Western editor. He
attended to them with careful pride, and never alluded to them as a
subject for his jokes, until, in his last illness, they had become
unnaturally fair, translucent, and attenuated. Then it was that a
friend calling upon him at his apartments in Piccadilly, endeavoured
to cheer him at a time of great mental depression, and pleasantly
reminded him of a ride they had long ago projected through the
South-Western States of the Union. "We must do that ride yet,
Artemus. Short stages at first, and longer ones as we go on." Poor
Artemus lifted up his pale, slender hands, and letting the light
shine through them, said jocosely, "Do you think these would do to