From Fairbairn's and Manchester, Fleeming passed to a railway survey in Switzerland, and thence again to Mr. Penn's at Greenwich, where he was engaged as draughtsman. There, in 1856, we find him in "a terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gunboats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign." From half-past eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a crowded office among uncongenial comrades, "saluted by chaff, generally low, personal, and not witty," pelted with oranges and apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, "across a dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied houses"; he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics, to study by himself in such spare time as remained to him; and there were several ladies, young and not so young, with whom he liked to correspond. But not all of these could compensate for the absence of that mother, who had made herself so large a figure in his life, for sorry surroundings, unsuitable society, and work that leaned to the mechanical. "Sunday," says he, "I generally visit some friends in town, and seem to swim in clearer water, but the dirty green seems all the dirtier when I get back. Luckily I am fond of my profession, or I could not stand this life." It is a question in my mind, if he could have long continued to stand it without loss. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good," quoth the young philosopher; but no man had a keener appetite for happiness than Fleeming Jenkin. There is a time of life besides, when, apart from circumstances, few men are agreeable to their neighbours, and still fewer to themselves; and it was at this stage that Fleeming had arrived, later than common, and even worse provided. The letter from which I have quoted is the last of his correspondence with Frank Scott, and his last confidential letter to one of his own sex. "If you consider it rightly," he wrote long after, "you will find the want of correspondence no such strange want in men's friendships. There is, believe me, something noble in the metal which does not rust, though not burnished by daily use." It is well said; but the last letter to Frank Scott is scarcely of a noble metal. It is plain the writer has outgrown his old self, yet not made acquaintance with the new. This letter from a busy youth of three-and-twenty, breathes of seventeen: the sickening alternations of conceit and shame, the expense of hope _in vacuo_, the lack of friends, the longing after love; the whole world of egoism under which youth stands groaning, a voluntary Atlas.