"I was in knickerbockers at the time," he said, "and introduced to the schoolboy public--_The Schoolboy's Punch_. It sounds strangely prophetic as I think of it now. The entire make-up of it was _a la Punch_, and it had its cartoon every week. At that time the Davenport Cabinet Trick was all the rage, and the very first cartoon I drew was founded on that. Here is the picture: myself--as a schoolboy--being tied up with ropes depictive of Greek, Latin, Euclid, and other cutting and disagreeable items. I am placed in the cabinet--the school. The head-master, whom I flattered very much in the drawing, opens another cabinet and out steps the young student covered with glory and scholastic honours thick upon him! From that moment my school-master spoiled me. I left school and started work. I got a pound for my first drawing. A. M. Sullivan started a paper in Ireland on very similar lines to _Punch_. There was a wave in Ireland of better class journalism at this time which had never existed before or since. I slipped in. For some years I drew on wood and engraved my own work. I was given to understand that all black and white men engraved their own efforts, so I offered myself as an apprentice to an engraver. "He said: 'Don't come as an apprentice. If you will undertake to look after my office, I'll teach you the art of engraving.'" It meant a hard struggle for young Furniss. He was loaded down with clerical work, but in his own little room, when the day's labours were done, he would sit up till two and three in the morning. There was no quenching his earnestness. Work then with him was a real desire. It is so to-day. To rest is obnoxious to him. He worked away. The feeling in Ireland against Englishmen at that time was very strong. Tom Taylor, then the editor of _Punch_, saw some of his sketches in Dublin, and advised him to go to the West of Ireland to make studies of character. He was in Galway, and he had persuaded a number of Irishmen who were breaking stones to pause in their work and let him sketch them. They consented. The overseer came up. "What d'yer mane," he cried, "allowing this hathen Saxon to draw yer?" "I've never been out of Ireland in my life," said the artist; but the overseer had seized him, and but for the intervention of the men, whom he had paid liberally for the "sitting," he would have thrown him into the river. Then a great trouble came. His father was stricken with blindness. The young man came to London, and with something more than the proverbial half-crown in his pocket. He was nineteen years of age when he hurried out of Euston Station one morning and stood for a moment thinking--for he did not know a soul in the Metropolis. But he soon found an opportunity.