"Is that anecdote in the papers _true_, that some one has sent you a pebble with an accidental (and not a 'doctored') likeness of Harcourt? If so, let me suggest that your most _graceful_ course of action will be to have it photographed, and to present prints of it to any authors whose books you may at any time chance to illustrate!" This is the "anecdote": "Someone found on the seashore the other day a pebble moulded exactly on the lines of Mr. Furniss' portrait of Sir William Harcourt." Other notices were in verse. This from _Vanity Fair_ is the best: "For Fame, 'tis said, Sir William craves, And to some purpose he has sought her; His face is fashioned by the waves: When will his name be 'writ in water'?" I lay under a charge of plagiarism. Nature had "invented" my Harcourt portrait, and had been at work upon it probably before I was born; the wild waves had by degrees moulded a shell into the familiar features, and when completed had left the sea-sculptured sketch high and dry on the coast. I now publish, with thanks, a photo-reproduction of the shell (not a pebble) as I received it: it is not in any way "doctored." It is a large, weather-beaten shell. [Illustration: NATURE'S PUZZLE PORTRAIT.] There is no doubt but that at one time Lewis Carroll studied _Punch_, for in one of his earliest letters to me he writes: "To the best of my recollection, one of the first things that suggested to me the wish to secure your help was a marvellously successful picture in _Punch_ of a House of Lords entirely composed of Harcourts, where the figures took all possible attitudes, and gave all possible views of the face; yet each was a quite unmistakable Sir William Harcourt!" Again he refers to _Punch_ (March, 1890): "A wish has been expressed in our Common Room (Christ's Church, Oxford), where we take in and bind _Punch_, that we could have 'keys' to the portraits in the Bishop of Lincoln's Trial and the 'ciphers' in Parliament" (a Parliamentary design of mine, "The House all Sixes and Sevens"). "Will you confer that favour on our Club? If you would give me them done roughly, I will procure copies of those two numbers, and subscribe the names in small MS. print, and have the pages bound in to face the pictures. The simplest way would be for you to put numbers on the faces, and send a list of names numbered to correspond." Yet a few years brought a change (October, 1894): "No doubt it is by your direction that three numbers of your new periodical have come to me. With many thanks for your kind thought, I will beg you not to waste your bounties on so unfit a recipient, for I have neither time nor taste for any such literature. I have much more work yet to do than I am likely to have life to do it in--and my taste for comic papers is _defunct_. We take in _Punch_ in our Common Room, but I never look at it!"