The Shipwreck Clerk, having lighted a cigar for himself, sat down in his revolving chair, turned his back to his desk, and threw himself into an easy cross-legged attitude, which showed that he was perfectly at home in that office. Harry Covare mounted a high stool, while the visitors seated themselves in three wooden arm-chairs. But few words had been said, and each man had scarcely tossed his first tobacco-ashes on the floor, when some one wearing heavy boots was heard opening an outside door and entering the Registrar's room. Harry Covare jumped down from his stool, laid his half-smoked cigarette thereon, and bounced into the next room, closing the door after him. In about a minute he returned, and the Shipwreck Clerk looked at him inquiringly. "An old cock in a pea-jacket," said Mr. Covare, taking up his cigarette and mounting his stool. "I told him the Registrar would be here in the morning. He said he had something to report about a shipwreck, and I told him the Registrar would be here in the morning. Had to tell him that three times, and then he went." "School don't keep Wednesday afternoons," said Mr. J. George Watts, with a knowing smile. "No, sir," said the Shipwreck Clerk, emphatically, changing the crossing of his legs. "A man can't keep grinding on day in and out without breaking down. Outsiders may say what they please about it, but it can't be done. We've got to let up sometimes. People who do the work need the rest just as much as those who do the looking on." "And more too, I should say," observed Mr. Mathers. "Our little let-up on Wednesday afternoons," modestly observed Harry Covare, "is like death--it is sure to come; while the let-ups we get other days are more like the diseases which prevail in certain areas--you can't be sure whether you're going to get them or not." The Shipwreck Clerk smiled benignantly at this remark, and the rest laughed. Mr. Mathers had heard it before, but he would not impair the pleasantness of his relations with a future colleague by hinting that he remembered it. "He gets such ideas from his beastly statistics," said the Shipwreck Clerk. "Which come pretty heavy on him sometimes, I expect," observed Mr. Mathers. "They needn't," said the Shipwreck Clerk, "if things were managed here as they ought to be. If John J. Laylor"--meaning thereby the Registrar--"was the right kind of a man you'd see things very different here from what they are now. There'd be a larger force." "That's so," said Mr. Mathers.