"I suppose you'll want to know something about my surroundings. They are not elegant; the office is a big barn of a place, crowded full of desks, where we sit and write from eight in the morning until any hour at night when it occurs to the boss to tell us we can go. Last night it was ten o'clock before the idea struck him. They kindly allow us an hour in which to run out to a restaurant for supper. The windows in the office were washed, so tradition runs, in 1493, the year after Columbus landed. Outside, the freight trains rush by constantly so as to keep the noise going. My boss, whose name is Clark, strikes me as being a sort of fool of an innocuous sort. He is a conscientious ass, but a poor, unfortunate, deluded simpleton. He's one of those close-fisted reubs whose chief care is the pennies, and whose only interest in life is the C. C. and P. Railroad. He makes his business his own personal affair and the C. C. and P. his god. He lunches down-town and pays twenty cents for his lunch, never more, often fifteen. One of the first things he told me was, now that I had come under his protecting wing, to begin to save money. They have a young man in the office here, whose desk is next to mine, who was born somewhere in Canada, and is always 'a-servin' of her Majesty the Queen,' as Kipling says. He told me with much gusto how he had hung out of the office window last New Year's a Canadian flag. He seemed proud of having done so, and also told me, boasted to me, in fact, that he was going to hang the same flag out of the same window on the Fourth of July. 'Oh, yes, you are!' thinks I. So I got the flag and ripped it into shreds and started it through the waste-basket on a hurried trip to oblivion. _À bas_ the Canadian flag! He'll probably get another one, but if I get hold of it, it'll meet the same fate as the first one. Then I have something to think of that'll keep my mind off my horrible fate in being here in Chicago, while I smile in ghoulish glee with a cynical leer overspreading my classic features, at the young man's disapproval of my actions. The rest of the men in the office aren't much to boast of. They're a diluted mixture of Nijni Norgordian and Bill Hoffman the jeweler. I still hate this town; I wish it were buried under seven hundred and thirty feet of Lake Michigan." Marley's next letter to Lavinia opened thus: "Extract from the diary of J. H. Anderson, Esq., Canadian, clerk in the freight office of the C. C. and P. Ry., at Chicago, Ill., April 20. "'New man on desk next to mine; young, about 24. Rather decent fellow, but conceited. Do not think he will last. Took me to lunch with him this evening.'