ry of your structure strikes you as admirably adapted to give
employment to an ingenious and anxious population, who, until our
present civilization, never dreamed of morselling out mankind for
their benefit.

As to commerce, our late experiences have chiefly pointed to the
pleasure of trading with nations who will not pay their debts,--like
the Yankees. There is, then, little encouragement in that quarter.
What then remains I scarcely know. The United Services are pleasant,
but poor things by way of a provision for life. Coach-driving, that
admirable refuge for the destitute, has been smashed by the railroads;
and there is a kind of prejudice against a man of family sweeping the
crossings. For my own part, I lean to something dignified and
respectable--something that does not compromise "the cloth," and
which, without being absolutely a sinecure, never exacts any undue or
extraordinary exertion,--driving a hearse, for instance: even this,
however, is greatly run upon; and the cholera, at its departure, threw
very many out of employment. However, the question is, what can a man
of small means do with his son? Short whist is a very snug thing--if a
man have natural gifts,--that happy conformation of the fingers, that
ample range of vision, that takes in everything around. But I must
not suppose these by any means general--and I legislate for the mass.
The turf has also the same difficulties,--so has toad-eating; indeed
these three walks might be included among the learned professions.

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 physici