taining his master by drawing wild caricatures of all comers; Mr. G——— hovered about the apartment, cutting off the mouldings of the oak panelling, and gashing the picture-frames with a ponderous axe, while his collar trailed along the floor and tripped everybody up; Sir W——— H——— (to admit whom, the door being too narrow, a large piece of the wall had to be taken down) occupied three large chairs, and had a special footman to attend to each of his chins; Lord R——— Ch———, but the scene was too terrible to describe. It will linger for ever in the memory of the horrified observer.
Suddenly the Marquis of S——— paused in the wild and hyperbolic revel; his goblet fell crashing from his hand on to the head of his comic artist, crushing him flat.
"Gommie, old boy," he said, solemnly, and in a voice whose vibrations echoed to the uttermost limits of the hall; "It's too hot! IT WON'T DO!"
Mr. G——— paused in his wild work of havoc. He smote thrice on his breast. "NO!" he said, slowly—hollowly.
****
The That very day The Retaliator was suppressed; and a short Bill was passed offering a handsome annuity to all caricaturists who would come back and resume their function of satirising public men. The latter, wise before it was too late—awakening to the truth in the very nick of time—had grasped the fact of the need of hostile caricature for the restraining of those fatal vagaries of deportment and aspect which public men, free from all salutary restraint, would carry to a pitch which makes one shudder to contemplate. It is all right again now—the public satirists are instated, and receive an honorarium from the Government.
"But just think what we might have come to," murmured Lord S———, in a voice tremulous with horror.
"Ah-h!" whispered Mr. G———, his bosom too full for words.
J. F. Sullivan
