shevelled,
his trousers worked by excitement halfway up his calves, emitting
various stertorous sounds after the manner of his brother, as he
savagely tore open the recently-arrived English newspapers. Such was the
interior of the office of the _Nation_, the representative organ of the
most advanced type of the National Press of Ireland.

But _Zozimus_, the paper to which I was then contributing, had nothing
in common with the rest of the publications issuing from that office. It
was of a purely social character, and was a praiseworthy attempt to do
something of a more artistic nature than the coarsely-conceived and
coarsely-executed National cartoons which were the only specimens of
illustrative art produced in Ireland. Fortunately for me, there was an
effort made in Dublin just then to produce a better class of
publications, and the result was that I began to get fairly busy,
although it was merely a wave of artistic energy, which did not last
long, but soon subsided into that dead level of mediocrity which does
not appear likely to be again disturbed.

I was now in my seventeenth year, and, intent on making as much hay as
possible the while the sun shone, I accepted every kind of work that was
offered me; and a strange medley it was. Religious books, medical works,
scientific treatises, scholastic primers and story books afforded in
turn illustrative material for my pencil. One week I was engaged upon
designs for the most advanced Catholic and Jesuitical manuals, and the
next upon similar work for a Protestant prayer-book. At one moment it
seemed as if I were destined to achieve fame as an artist of the
ambulance corps and the dissecting-room. One of my earliest
dreams--which I attribute to the fact that my eldest brother, with whom
I had much in common, was a doctor--had been to adopt the medical
profession. Curiously enough, my brother also had a taste for
caricaturing, and, like the illustrious John Leech in his medical
student days, he was wont to embellish his notes in the hospital
lecture-room with pictorial _jeux d'esprit_ of a livelier cast than
those for which scope is usually afforded by the discourses of the
learned Mr. Sawbones.

I remember that about this period a leading surgeon was anxious that I
should devote myself to the pursuit of this anything but pleasant form
of art, and seriously proposed that I should draw and paint for him some
of his surgical cases. I accepted his offer without hesitation