lift him about his bedroom like a child. His quarters in Picadilly, as I
have said, were just opposite the Hall, but he could not go backward and
forward without assistance. It was painful in the extreme to see the man
who was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before the
audience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain the
part of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death's
head, for he had to rouge his face to hide the pallor.

His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally nervous and fretful. The fog,
he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling him. At
one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion to this.
"But," cried he as he came off the stage, "that was not a hit, was it? The
English are scary about death. I'll have to cut it out."

He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky rather than smart business
stroke, for it was not of his own initiation. He did not continue his
contributions after he began to appear before the public, and the
discontinuance was made the occasion of some ill-natured remarks in certain
American papers, which very much wounded him. They were largely circulated
and credited at the time, the charge being that Messrs. Bradbury and Evans,
the publishers of the English charivari, had broken with him because the
English would not have him. The truth is that their original proposal was
made to him, not by him to them, the price named being fifteen guineas a
letter. He asked permission to duplicate the arrangement with some New York
periodical, so as to secure an American copyright. This they refused. I
read the correspondence at the time. "Our aim," they said, "in making
the engagement, had reference to our own circulation in the United States,
which exceeds twenty-seven thousand weekly."

I suggested to Artemus that he enter his book, "Artemus Ward in London,"