The sale ran into thirty thousand the first year of publication, and as I was fortunate enough to have published it on a royalty, I am glad to say it is still selling. [Illustration: THE SNUGGERY] 'The Social Kaleidoscope' was my first book. With it I made my actual _début_ between covers. I hadn't done very well before then; since then I have, from a worldly point of view, done remarkably well--far better than I deserved to do, my good-natured friends assure me, and I cordially agree with them. But I had made a good fight for it, and I had suffered years of disappointment and rebuff. I began to send contributions to periodicals when I was fourteen years old, and a boy at Hanwell College. _Fun_ was the first journal I favoured with my effusions, and week after week I had a sinking at the heart as I bought that popular periodical and searched in vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my smart paragraphs. It took me thirteen years to get something printed and paid for, but I succeeded at last, and it was _Fun_, my early love, that first took me by the hand. When I was on the staff of _Fun_, and its columns were open to me for all I cared to write, I used often to look over the batch of boyish efforts that littered the editor's desk, and let my heart go out to the writers who were suffering the pangs that I had known so well. [Illustration: MR. SIMS'S 'LITTLE DAWG'] I had had effusions of mine printed before that, but I didn't get any money for them. I had the pleasure of seeing my signature more than once in the columns of certain theatrical journals, in the days when I was a constant first-nighter, and a determined upholder of the privileges of the pit. And I even had some of my poetry printed. In the old box to which I have gone in search of the first edition of my first book, there are two papers carefully preserved, because they were once my pride and glory. One is a copy of the _Halfpenny Journal_, and the other is a copy of the _Halfpenny Welcome Guest_. On the back page of the correspondence column of the former there is a poem signed 'G. R. S.,' addressed to a young lady's initials in affectionately complimentary terms. Alas! I don't know what has become of that young lady. Probably she is married, and is the mother of a fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten that I ever wrote verses in her honour. I think I sent her a copy of the _Halfpenny Journal_, but a few weeks after a coldness sprang up between us. She was behind the counter of a confectioner's shop in Camden Town, and I found her one afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine who used to buy his butterscotch there. My friend and I had words, but between myself and that fair confectioner 'the rest was silence.' [Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM]