at it a day and a half, so I can't tell you much about either the boss or the work yet, but I think we shall get on very well together. Hartley is his name, and this much is tolerably certain concerning him, he is a rising man, his business is increasing, and, as I said before, I am his senior draughtsman, therefore should he "hum," I shall endeavour to hum too. Tell old Major that I can whistle as loud and as long as I like, and that I can smoke all day if I please. But I don't please; that's just the rummy part of it. Now in Hawk's shanty they don't like whistling, and for the life of me I couldn't keep quiet there. Also they object to the fumes of tobacco, therefore they missed many a half hour of my time, which was spent in sacrificing to the king of weeds. Here, in a free country, I can do as I please, and yet, for some reason or another, I don't do it. The office is on the fourth flat of the Victoria Chambers--good height up you see. My lamp is going out--must shut up for to-night.... Well, I've just come down again from up a height, as they say in your part of the world. I finished my first drawing to-day, was highly commended, and gave it my junior to trace. My second job is a patent saw-sharpening affair for circular saws. They want half-a-dozen different plane views, and a perspective arrangement, to be worked up from a few rough tracings, a rougher specification, and a photograph with a man in it--the patentee, I believe--so if I flatter him in the matter of unlikeness he is bound to be well pleased. I don't know yet, though, if he has to go in or not. The Patent Office is bound to keep a record, in pictures or models, of the results of mens' brains, whether eccentric or otherwise, but not of the general appearance of their possessors. More's the pity, I think; for from what I have seen of the models in the Patent Office, they would furnish specimens for the phrenological study of mental imbecility for generations to come. I only had time just to run through the model rooms, but here is the idea of a patent which tickled me immensely. It was simply a lot of wooden geese fastened at the end of long sticks all over and around a boat. They were grouped together in most picturesque confusion, some standing on their heads and some on their tails, and some, _I believe_, supposed to be flying. The idea was that when real live geese saw this affair like a mad Noah's ark on the water, they would recognise their brethren and come flocking along to be shot by the other goose inside with the gun. Perhaps being geese they would do just that, but then what depravity on the part of the warlike one thus to take advantage of the eccentricities of his fellows. I have never seen the affair used. It does not seem to have made great progress in the good opinion of the public. Perhaps, after all, the bloodthirsty quacker, who offers to the irreverant eye this melancholy evidence of insanity, had a cynically low opinion of his kind, causing him to