For my own pleasure (I do not know whether it was for other people's), I used to sing the comic songs, "Johnny Sands," "The Cork Leg," and "The Lost Child," to my own pianoforte accompaniment. I was never taught the tunes or words of these songs, but picked them up as children do, and reproduced them at the piano in a fashion of my own. One delightful consequence of this was, that the number of my invitations to juvenile parties was considerably increased. I added to my stock of songs of course, and so found I was kept up to a late hour--at grown-up parties, too. Though not too young to learn and sing these songs, I was not old enough to always understand their purport. There was a song, about this time, which was all the rage in London. The tune was heard on every organ and band, in every ballroom and theatre. I bought a penny song-book with the words, which I learned off by heart, and, as usual, picked out my accompaniment on the piano. One evening I launched it before the grown-up people who always turn up at the latter end of a juvenile party, and some of whom generally requested that I should be kept and made to sing to them. My friend Frank Burnand, in his incomparable _Happy Thoughts_, tells how he was singing a comic song before an unsympathetic audience, and suddenly remembering a verse was not quite proper, backed out of it. In my own case, I had no notion that the verse was _risque_. I did not even understand it; so out it came with the full force of my penny-whistle voice. I never heard so much laughter in a room before. There was a general request for the song to be encored; but this was just a little too much for the feelings of my fond and hitherto proud mother, who made a dash at me, and shut me and the piano up at the same moment. There is a period when the voice breaks, but I do not think I ever had a voice to break; at all events, I never remember the time when I ceased singing comic songs. When half-way through my teens I began to write snatches of songs and illustrations, and received much help and encouragement from my father. He used to take me to the old Gallery of Illustration, to hear the inimitable John Parry; and this infused not only a new life, but a totally different style, into my work. Still in my teens, I used to be asked to the grown-up parties of Mr. Toole, Mr. Charles Millward, Mr. Henry Neville, and Mr. John Hollingshead, the last-named of whom, only the other day, reminded me that I never could be persuaded to sing before supper, excusing myself on the ground that the songs always went so much better _after_ supper. So they did, and so they still do.