“Glad you like my Dickens. I shall go down on my knees when I see you (you will have to help me up again, though, as I have the gout) and swear the truth, which is, I illustrated the whole of Dickens between the 1st of May last year and New Year’s Day. Eight months, having it read and re-read as I worked, and yet I am alive!
“You do not say how you are, but I do hope your eye trouble is over.
“Yours very sincerely,
“Harry Furniss.”
Later in the autumn, accompanying a brief note snatched out of the over-busy worker’s day, is the expressive sentence, scribbled beside a pen-and-ink sketch of Father Time bearing the artist’s easel upon his back, as the patriarch squats and smokes, and H. F. breathlessly paints:
“Still working against Time.”
Doubtless he will go on doing so all his life, five hundred new illustrations for Thackeray later being but an episode, and yet he found time to illustrate many of his letters to friends: I have many I prize.
CHAPTER XVI
“THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS”
A KNOCK came at the prison door.