'My next essay at fortune took a military turn. I went down to Charles Street, Westminster, met a recruiting sergeant, declared my enthusiastic yearning to join the sappers and miners, and soiled my palm with the Saxon shilling. My martial career was not remarkably lengthened. I failed to "pass the doctor" next morning--he told me I had varicose veins! Bad manners to his impudence, the pursy little humbug! I only wished you and I had him alongside us up Keeper Hill, on one of our boyhood's rambles, and we'd soon take the wind and the conceit out of him. 'What was I to do now? I was fairly at my wits' end. To rob I was not able--it requires genius here; to beg I was ashamed. I had serious thoughts of trying my hand at the fine arts. I heard that those fellows who chalk mackerel on the pavement make a tidy living out of it, and it struck me that a new departure in that direction might bring me fame and fortune. My notion--it may turn up a trump yet for somebody--was to paint caricatures in distemper on the backs of tortoises. But I had no spare cash to lay out on stock, either in pigments or specimens of the genus _testudo_. 'At last I met Providence in the form of Dan McCarthy, of Doonas. "Hyacinth," said he, "do you know anything of boxing?" I was puzzled, for I wasn't sure but he meant boxing the compass, but I found I had got into the wrong box there. The long and short of it was, a friend of his had asked him to look up a smart man with a ready pen and a vigorous imagination, who would undertake to write racy accounts of some of the renowned fisticuff fights of old, for a publican's newspaper. That's what I am doing now, God forgive me! The pay is good, but the work does not like me, I am wise in the "upper-cut," and am known to every "scrapper" in the "drums" of the East and West End, and all the rest; in short, I am comparatively comfortable, but completely demoralized. When you come over next, I can take you, perhaps, to a "merry little mill," for I am always in the "know." 'Don't come, though, an you're sensible, in such weather as we have now. Fog! fog!! fog!!! How I envy you the clear skies of the one city in the world outside Ireland worth living in--wicked, delightful Paris. D----n the London fog! It caught me by the larynx and laid me by the heels three days last November. It steals on you like a garrotter, throttles you, chokes your lungs, clogs your fancy, clouds your good-humour, and sets your drunken landlady stealing your coal by the scuttle and your gin by the quartern. 'Your affectionate coz, 'HYACINTH BLAKE.