years afterwards he died of disease of the lungs,
in his forty-sixth year: thus reaching the extreme
limits of a giant's life. The wonder is that he
ever lived so long; as his huge frame seemed to
be only half vitalised. When lie walked, he never
lifted his feet from the ground, but went shuffling
along in the most painful manner, sometimes
resting his hands upon the shoulders of
his companions; and when he stood up, he had
to put his hands upon the small of his back, as
if his spine wanted keeping in shape.

It was O'Brien who frightened the watchman
by lighting his pipe at a street-lamp. The
man coming suddenly upon this appalling spectre
at dead of night, fell down in a fit, and was
carried to the nearest lock-up. Another time
the giant's carriage was stopped by a highwayman,
when O'Brien, putting his head out of the
window, the terrified highwayman immediately
clapped spurs to his horse and fled.

O'Brien was the king of his tribe, and—as far
as was possible for a giant—enjoyed life. He
was wont at times to retire from the busy haunts
of man and reside in a mansion near Epping
Forest, which had once belonged to a nobleman,
and has since been converted into an inn. He
seems to have been an amiable, quiet sort
of giant, and, up to the last, loved to meet his
friends over the cheerful glass and pipe. "His
stature increased till he arrived at the age of
twenty-five, when his growth abated somewhat"
(pretty nearly time), but he continued growing
a little after that period, till he attained the
height of eight feet seven inches; his foot being
seventeen inches, and his hand twelve inches
long. He took very good care no one should
dissect him, for his grave was dug ten feet deep
in the solid rock; after which it was thoroughly
fastened, and watched.

The Irish giant, whose skeleton is such a
striking object in the Museum of the College
of Surgeons in London, had a very brief career
of it. Being addicted to whisky, and having
one day lost all his money, he gave himself
up to such a debauch (to drown care) that his
health broke down, and he died at the age of
twenty-two.

It was believed by his friends that he was
buried at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and his
coffin was certainly taken there, though he
wished that his remains should be sunk in the
sea; but John Hunter was determined to have
his body, and actually paid five hundred pounds
for it. The skeleton is eight feet high. It is well
and strongly made, the huge frame being quite
symmetrical, except that the neck of one thigh-bone
is longer than the other; the tissue of the
bones, however, does not seem to be so
compact as in other skeletons. Large as the head
looks, there is not more room for brain than in
a man of moderate size.

The writer having seen with his own eyes
this skeleton, and having learned that the skeleton
of this giant's great rival lay ten feet deep
in the rock, was not a little startled by being
told that the skeleton of the Irish giant was
in the anatomical room of Trinity College,
Dublin. Sure enough a giant's skeleton is, or
was, there, of which the following history has
been given:

The celebrated Berkely, Bishop of Cloyne, of
tar-water memory, in one of his rambles found
a boy seated on a door-step, apparently in an
advanced stage of hunger and poverty. Being
of a benevolent disposition, the bishop relieved
his necessities; but being also of a philosophic
turn of mind, he subjected this hapless orphan
to a series of interesting experiments: putting
him through the same fattening process by
which prize pigs and bullocks are brought to
the verge of suffocation. These succeeded to
perfection; the youth shot up like a
scarlet-runner, and at sixteen years of age was
seven feet high. M'Grath (that was his name)
now made the tour of part of Europe as the
"Prodigious Irish Giant." But the bigger he
grew, the more fatuous and helpless he became,
until at last he died a giant's death of sheer
old age, when little more than nineteen.

Dr. Musgrave sent to the Royal Society, an
account of a young Irishman, Edward Malme,
seven feet six high when he was nineteen. Dr.
Molyneux, however, told the Society that he
measured this man himself in Dublin, and that
he was, at that early age, seven feet seven without
his shoes: so we are indebted to Ireland for
four authentic modern giants.

One summer evening, as the writer was passing
through a beautiful little burying-ground near
Hanover, he observed a figure sculptured on a
tombstone, more like a Guy Fawkes than anything
else, except that it had no pipe in its mouth and
stood upright: which of course a genuine guy
could not do. Otherwise it had the true tumble-about,
helpless, half wide-awake look peculiar
to these creations of youthful fancy. It was
the likeness of Christoff Munster, born at
Erlosen, near Münden, June, 1632, and
defunct at Hanover, August, 1676, so that he
lived almost as long as the great O'Brien.
His effigy is in the costume of the body
guards of the Elector, in which he served: the
tasseled cap, long single-breasted tunic, and
slashed hose. In the simple and pious epitaph
he is represented to have been four ells and a
half high. The lowest calculation of the old
German ell is twenty-four inches French, but
a friend accustomed to German measures computed
four ells and a half at nine feet and a half.

He also was given to lighting his pipe at the
lamps, and had to stoop down to get at them.
Being an object of much solicitude to his
paternal government, he was allowed eight times
as much food as any other person: which he
always promptly disposed of, to say nothing of
a loaf or two at his own cost into the bargain.
Having been guilty of disobedience to his
commanding officer, he was put into the stocks,
or rather pillory. It is needless to say that he
was congratulated respecting this distinction by
the boys of the place, who waited in a body
upon him, for that purpose. As, in addition to
the comfort derived from their very
sympathising remarks, he endured all the discomfort