Our work there was sufficiently strenuous. There were three of us stationed in a room above the editorial sanctum, and here, between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and twelve, we were engaged upon three columns of notes which formed the first page of the paper. The three of us were Purnell, Francillon the novelist, and myself; and the life, wholly new to me, was at the time strangely fascinating and attractive. Purnell was himself one of the quaintest and most characteristic figures I have ever encountered. A regular Bohemian in a Bohemia that has long lost its sea-board, he had the Bohemian frank detestation of work and utter disregard of all social conventions, and yet with these peculiarities were linked a fine taste and a personality of real distinction. When I first met him he had just completed a series of papers in the _Athenæum_ upon the drama under the signature of “Q,” winning some little renown in a sharp controversy with Charles Reade, in which he was certainly not worsted. My other stable companion, Francillon, was of an exactly opposite temperament. Endowed with considerable imagination, which was happily exhibited in _Pearl and Emerald_, a novel which had been published in the _Cornhill Magazine_, he was by habit plodding and industrious, qualities which aroused in Purnell a degree of disapproval that sometimes almost verged on resentment. “Now, Francillon,” he used to say, “loves work. I don’t. I hate it; I loathe it! People will tell you, my dear Carribus”--for so he often addressed me--“that to work is to pray. Well, of the two, _I_ find it easier to pray. Why should I work?” he used to add, with an air of deep and earnest conviction. “I want nothing, only my twopence. All I need is a herring and a glass of ale, and when I have earned that I like to be idle. Some men, so they say, like work. I don’t!” And he did not. One fixed appointment which he held was to contribute a weekly article on Conservative Policy to the pages of an important provincial paper. Long before the day came when this article had to be despatched by the evening post he used to look upon the impending task with something like horror, and yet nothing could ever induce him to anticipate by an hour the execution of his labours. Indeed, as a rule, he never wrote it at all. When the day came and we had finished our morning’s work on the _Globe_, he would generally invite Francillon and myself to a frugal lunch at the old Gaiety Restaurant, and when the invitation was issued we always knew what was in store for us. As the lunch neared its end he would breach the subject by imploring us to supply him with a topic. “It’s the topic, my dear boy, there’s the devil of it. If I only had a topic I could do it in an hour”--a purely fallacious statement, seeing that no amount of topics would ever have induced him to do it single-handed at all.