The Pencil pricked up his ears, and with a knowing wink, said:
"Ah, I see! You want to know secrets. Well, I will tell you 'how it's done.' The great point about a caricature is that it must be caught unawares. A man when he thinks he is unobserved struts about gaily, just for all the world like a hedgehog. All his peculiarities are then as evident as your cousins the quills upon the back of the fretful porcupine. But the moment the man or woman who is about to be caricatured observes H. F. take me in hand, I always notice that he shrivels up and collapses as quickly as one of the insectivora surprised at his feast. But wait a moment: now you ask me, I do recollect one unfortunate man who, despite H. F.'s protest, insisted upon coming here once to sit for a caricature. He looked the picture of misery, and sat in the chair there, just as if he were at a dentist's. H. F. made a most flattering portrait. Indeed, so much too handsome was it that I could hardly follow the workings of his fingers, I was laughing so."
"'Oh, what a relief!' cried the sitter, when H. F. showed him the drawing. 'You have certainly made a pretty guy of me, but, thank heaven, I am not thin-skinned.'
"'Only thick-headed,' muttered H. F. _sotto voce_ to me as he continued to chat with the sitter.
"No sooner had he left the studio than the 'study' was in the fire, and the caricature which afterwards came from the Furniss was drawn entirely from memory.
"The artist is in more evil case when he has absolutely no chance whatever of making the slightest memorandum, for he must trust to memory alone," remarked the Pencil.
"Yet Pellegrini boasted that he always trusted to memory," said the Pen.
"I know he did," replied the Pencil, "and more than once chaffed H. F. for bringing me out. H. F., I know, has the greatest admiration for most of Pellegrini's work, but thinks that 'Ape' certainly had the failing common to all Italian caricaturists of being cruel rather than funny. I may mention too, here, an incident for the truth of which H. F. can vouch, and which illustrates another weakness of the inhabitants of the Sunny South. When the poor fellow was ill a friend of his one day set to work to put his room in order, and in moving a screen was surprised to find behind it a number of soiled shirts. He began to count them over with a view to sending them to the laundry, when Pellegrini starting up exclaimed, 'You fellow! you leave my shirts there, or I am a ruined man. Don't you see they are my "shtock in drade"?' And sure enough upon the huge familiar linen cuffs were numerous notes in pencil--sketches, in fact, from life for coming caricatures. Now, when H. F. intends to trust entirely to memory, I often find that he makes a note in writing after this fashion: 'Like So-and-so, with a difference,'--and the difference is noted. Or 'Think of an animal, a bird, or a fish, and to that add So-and-so, and subtract So-and-so,' and this results in a portrait. For instance, if he saw a man like this, I should not be surprised by his writing a single word as 'Penguin' for his guidance, and so on."