A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his assignment
at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to
find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what
was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in
brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions.

When first I knew him he lived--nowhere, being always on the move. He
kept, however, a dingy little room near Paddington where his books and
papers accumulated, undusted but safe, and where the manuscripts of his
adventures were found when his death made me the executor of his few
belongings. The key was in his pocket, carefully ticketed with a bone
label. And this, the only evidence of practical forethought I ever
discovered in him, was proof that something in that room was deemed by
him of value--to others. It certainly was not the heterogeneous
collection of second-hand books, nor the hundreds of unlabeled
photographs and sketches. Can it have been the MSS. of stories, notes,
and episodes I found, almost carefully piled and tabulated with titles,
in a dirty kitbag of green Willesden canvas?

Some of these he had told me (with a greater vividness than he could
command by pen); others were new; many unfinished. All were unusual,
to say the least. All, too, had obviously happened to himself at some
period of his roving career, though here and there he had disguised his
own part in them by Hoffmann's device of throwing the action into the
third person. Those told to me by word of mouth I could only feel were
true, true for himself at least. In no sense were they mere inventions,
but arose in moments of vision upon a structure of solid events. Ten
men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path;
but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the
snake, the path, the movement. O'Malley was some such eleventh man. He