This is no exaggeration. Man becomes accustomed to everything upon this earth, even to eating arsenic and to the poisonous air of overcrowded rooms. Such rooms, however, do not on that account become any the pleasanter to live in. Another and almost equally serious inconvenience to which several of those engaged there have perforce to become reconciled, is that of having to work so close together in small rooms, sometimes only divided by a papered partition, through which every conversation not conducted in a whisper interrupts the course of their own thoughts, and (I refer of course to the period above specified, though I quote from my diary in the present tense) the inconvenience is not diminished by the circumstance that some of the gentlemen employed there seem unable to speak in a low voice. The furniture, which includes some fossils from the primeval Alopaeus period, is made of every kind of wood grown in our forests and gardens, and constructed in every fashion and style of cabinet-making, reaching back to the last century. Yellow plum-tree, dark mahogany, common deal, japanned, polished and merely planed wood, writing-tables, standing and cylinder desks, document cupboards, open shelves for books, journals and papers, and, in the furthest chambers of the labyrinth, a few sofas, each of which almost invariably differs in shape and material from its neighbour, are arranged along the walls in motley array. Several of these have the dignity of age. Not the most ancient of these grey and antique relics is a desk at which some official has, I believe for thirty years, always sharpened his pencil on the same spot, until at length his penknife has dug a hole right through the inch and a half thickness of the wood. These venerable survivals are calculated to provoke many thoughts both serious and humorous; but there is one in particular which they all suggested, at any rate to me. How it must have worried these ancient pieces of furniture, after so many years and decades of fruitless but comfortable routine, to find themselves suddenly roused in 1862 by the new spirit that had entered and filled the house! Can they ever have grown reconciled to that swift, exacting, imperious and not very considerate genius, even when they saw the fruits, the immense success, of the organisation which he introduced? One must assume that furniture has no interest in or understanding of such matters.