request that the other should put everything else on one side in order
to solve the enigma.

Lack of method and a haphazard and unlimited generosity were not his
only Irish qualities. He had a quick, chivalrous temper, too, and I
remember the difficulty I once had in restraining him from leaping the
counter of a small tobacconist's in Great Portland Street, to give the
man a good dressing for an imagined rudeness--not to himself, but to
me. And there is more than one 'bus conductor in London who has cause
to remember this sturdy Quixotic passenger's championship of a poor
woman to whom insufficient courtesy seemed to him to have been shown.
Normally kindly and tolerant, his indignation on hearing of injustice
was red hot. He burned at a story of meanness. It would haunt him all
the evening. "Can it really be true?" he would ask, and burst forth
again to flame.

Abstemious himself in all things, save reading and writing and helping
his friends and correspondents, he mixed excellent whisky punch, as he
called it. He brought to this office all the concentration which he
lacked in his literary labours. It was a ritual with him; nothing
might be hurried or left undone, and the result, I might say,
justified the means. His death reduces the number of such convivial
alchemists to one only, and he is in Tasmania, and, so far as I am
concerned, useless.

His avidity as a reader--his desire to master his subject--led to some
charming eccentricities, as when, for a daily journey between Earl's
Court Road and Addison Road stations, he would carry a heavy hand-bag
filled with books, "to read in the train." This was no satire on the
railway system, but pure zeal. He had indeed no satire in him; he
spoke his mind and it was over.

It was a curious little company that assembled to do honour to this
old kindly bachelor--the two or three relatives that he possessed, and
eight of his literary friends, most of them of a good age, and for the
most part men of intellect, and in one or two cases of world-wide
reputation, and all a little uncomfortable in unwonted formal black.
We were very grave and thoughtful, but it was not exactly a sad
funeral, for we knew that had he lived longer--he was sixty-three--he
would certainly have been an invalid, which would have irked his
active, restless mind and body almost unbearably; and we knew, also,
that he had died in his first real illness after a very happy life.
Since we knew this, and also