As to railroads, I 'm sick of hearing of them for the last three years. Every family in the empire has at least one civil engineer within its precincts; and I 'm confident, if their sides were as hard as their skulls, you could make sleepers for the whole Grand Junction by merely decimating the unemployed. Tax-collecting does, to be sure, offer some little prospect; but that won't last. Indeed, the very working of the process will limit the advantages of this opening,--gradually converting all the payers into paupers. Now I have meditated long and anxiously on the subject, conversing with others whose opportunities of knowing the world were considerable, but never could I find that ingenuity opened any new path, without its being so instantaneously overstocked that competition alone denied every chance of success. One man of original genius I did, indeed, come upon, and his career had been eminently successful. He was a Belgian physician, who, having in vain attempted all the ordinary modes of obtaining practice, collected together the little residue of his fortune, and sailed for Barbadoes, where he struck out for himself the following singularly new and original plan:--He purchased all the disabled, sick, and ailing negroes that he could find; every poor fellow whose case seemed past hope, but yet to his critical eye was still curable, these he bought up; they were, of course, dead bargains. The masters were delighted to get rid of them--they were actually “eating their heads off;” but the doctor knew, that though they looked somewhat “groggy,” still there was a “go” in them yet. By care, skill, and good management, they recovered under his hands, and frequently were re-sold to the original proprietor, who was totally unconscious that the sleek and shining nigger before him had been the poor, decrepid, sickly creature of some weeks before.