In the months that lay between this day and the day on which Lancaster had first felt the soil of Europe under his foot, there had come to him many experiences, many amusements. He had accepted all things. Unfettered by any restraints he had probed all the novelties that presented themselves. He had lived in alternating fevers of discriminations and hard work. For all these new aspects of life and living filled him with the old, dear mania to create. He found himself inspired by the very overflow of his sensations. From long draughts of enjoyment he plunged into as long fits of artistic energy.
He found, moreover, that the increased tension of his spiritual being put a peculiar force into his pencil. Because it was merely one way of laughter, because he began in a spirit of flippancy, the sketches all succeeded immensely. Fortune began to favor him in artistic ways. In Paris he had made a portfolio full of the most admirable sketches of types. There was a crafty cynicism about his work that gave a fascination to them; something not caricature, but finer. Now he chose as his subject the traveling millionaire, now the splendid queen of the boulevard, now the phantom of the "brasserie," and now the rag-picker. One day he had showed some sketches to a man that had begged permission to glance through the portfolio, as they sat, in a crowded café, at the same table. The man was the manager of a famous illustrated paper. He bought some of the sketches, and presently there appeared a most astonishingly eulogistic article, about this young American.
People carefully read the name. They had never heard of him. They looked at the sketches. That was certainly talent of a significant sort. The other papers followed suit. The noise of this discovery went across the channel. There came to this young man orders from London, and the newspapers of that town began to print the most extraordinary inventions, by way of personalities, about him. The world, now as ever, is always glad of a new subject. After that Parisian journal had sounded the first note, the volume of sound that had as its burden Lancaster's name, grew and grew. Of course, there were those that dissented, that took occasion to flay this young man's achievements until there seemed left only a skeleton of faults. But even that only swelled the flood.