unawares, and the artist made the most of his opportunities. They
add to the debt which the historians of contemporary manners will
owe to Reynolds in the future, for as a sidelight on social habits
of the present day these pictures of the dinner-table will be
instructive. The very triteness of their theme gives them their
interest.

[Illustration: "GAZED ON HAROLD"
_From "Paris and Some Parisians"_]

[Illustration: FROM A PARIS SKETCH-BOOK]

Of late years Reynolds' pen-and-ink drawings have been a familiar
feature of the pages of _Punch_. His gentle satires therein have
been at the expense of all classes of the community. But his most
successful and best remembered jokes have perhaps been those which
depicted the unconscious humours of Cockney low life. His illustration
of "Precedence at Battersea," in which one small gutter-snipe struggles
with another for a cricket bat, indignantly declaring that "The
Treasurer goes in before the bloomin' Seketery," is by way of becoming
a classic. Equally clever is the study of a small boy, (reproduced on
page 27) whose "pomptiousness" on attaining the dignity of knickers
forms the subject of admiring comment from his mother to a friendly
curate: the mother herself being a wonderful study of low life.
In "Going It" (page 59) the artist harks back to the theme of
"freak-study," if such a term is permissible, the expressions on
the faces of the two figures exhibiting well his acute powers of
observation.

[Illustration]