But in the days of my vanity grown men carried with them into a tun-bellied middle-age the fine flow of animal spirits and inordinate capacity for fun which nowadays would be deprecated by the well-regulated schoolboy. In Fleet Street one would have thought that there would have been no time for any joking beyond an occasional interchange of verbal pleasantries. But even in that busy thoroughfare the practical joker found—or made—occasions for the exercise of his fearsome talents. It is something of a truism to say that the real man is very seldom the man as he is observed in his public appearances. Who, for instance, who only knew Edmund O’Donovan as the learned writer of travel articles in the _Quarterly Review_, the accomplished special correspondent of a one-time influential daily, the honoured guest of savants, the respected lecturer before Royal Societies—who, I say, who saw O’Donovan with his Society war-paint on could have imagined the wild, undisciplined, half-mad, but wholly delightful creature that was exhibited at intervals to Society in conventional garb. He was the maddest and the most modest Irishman I ever met. When he returned from his extraordinary adventures in Merv, he did not put up at some swagger hotel in London, where he would be easily accessible to Society intent on making him the lion of a season. He lodged at a public-house in Holborn kept by a fellow-countryman of his, named Peter Cowell. This house was at the time known to the police in connection with the visits of Irish patriots of the physical force party in national politics. It was the resort of the scattered remnants of a disintegrated Fenianism. Cowell revered his strange guest, and when customers heard the sounds of revolver practice in the upper part of the house, you may be sure that he did not give his patrons the true explanation of the noise. The fact was that O’Donovan, in bed at midday, had grown greatly annoyed at the crude art evinced in the engravings that Cowell had hung upon his walls, and that he was engaged in shooting those masterpieces into smithereens. This revolver practice in his bedroom only ceased when there was nothing breakable left to fire at. “Glory be to God!” said Peter Cowell, in relating the circumstance to a correspondent, “there’s not a pictur’ nor a frame nor a utinshill of anny kyoind that Misther O’Donovan hasn’t bruk _an’ ped for_!”