“I was speaking of my first interview with him at his house, Mornington Crescent, Regent’s Park,” says Cuthbert Bede. “He wished me to write a humorous story of modern life, to be illustrated by himself, with a series of designs, something after the style of his ‘Adventures of Mr. Lambkin; or, The Bachelor’s own Book,’ and he jotted down some rough memoranda and sketches (in pencil) embodying his own ideas on the subject. One of these slight drawings was singularly skilful. It represented the shoulders and the tops of the heads of people in the pit of a theatre, as they would appear to a spectator in the gallery--the foreshortening being both curious and difficult. As a matter of course, I gave my best consideration to Mr. Cruikshank’s suggestions and ideas, but submitted to him that I could not see my way to carry them out to our mutual satisfaction; and I also raised objections to the somewhat hackneyed nature of the themes that he suggested, and stated my preference for writing a story that should be wholly and entirely my own original composition. After much discussion pro and con, Mr. Cruikshank yielded to my wishes, and said, ‘Then the tale shall be entirely out of your own head!’ While he spoke, he rapidly drew a fancy sketch of my head, to the back portion of which was affixed a pig-tail, as large as that worn by an old-fashioned Jack Tar. He held this sketch up to his wife, who had just then re-entered the room, and said, in his cheery way, ‘We have settled the point. He does not like my whiskers,’--the hero of the tale, I may add, was to have been readily distinguished in the illustrations by the peculiarity of his whiskers,--‘so he is going to get a _tail_ out of his own head.’ It reminded me of his sketch of the grenadier, whose pig-tail was tied so tightly that he was unable to shut his eyes; also of another pig-tail sketch in the Omnibus, where the gentleman who, has gone to bed ‘half-seas over’ wakes up to sobriety, and, springing out of bed, discovers that his pig-tail has been tied to the bell-rope, and that the house has been aroused through his vain struggles to get free.” “The Adventures of Mr. Lambkin” were entirely Cruikshank’s own, and they were the least successful, and deservedly so, of his works.