awaiting their papers, or when chewing the cud of contentment or despair at the contemplation of the same—on what might be the vicissitudes of their lot in the event of their failure or success.

At a given signal, fifty-nine other persons and myself, all doomed to compete for six vacancies in the much-desired office of the Obstructor General, were ushered, like schoolboys, into another and inner room, opening out of the former and garnished with rows of green-baize-covered tables, running from end to end.

This room seemed to bring back to me a host of old recollections; and, each moment, I was expecting to see the ghost of “Old Jack,” my head instructor at Queen’s College School in days of yore, and hear him exclaiming in his well-remembered stentorian tones—“Boy Lorton—you are detained for inattention! Stop in and write five hundred lines!”—and, then, to see him come swooping down the room upon me, with wrath and majesty seated on his bald brow and his gown flowing behind him.

He generally took such enormous strides, when moved with a sudden desire to punish some lost soul, whom he might suspect of the heinous crimes of idleness or “cribbing”—both unforgivable offences in his calendar—that the aforesaid gown, I recollect, seemed frequently to float over his head—forming in conjunction with his square college cap, alias “mortar board,” a regular “nimbus,” like that surrounding the heads of the saints in old pictures.

The Polite Letter Writer Commissioners—or rather, their executive—were, I must confess, much quieter in their demeanour, moving about as stealthily as if they were engaged in any number of Gunpowder, or Rye House Plots, or other conspiracies.

Perhaps, you say, they were much too orderly in their proceedings for me?

Well, I don’t think so, exactly; still, I do not believe much in the justice and impartiality of the Vehmgerichte, Parliamentary committees, the Berlin police, the prefects of the past empire, Monsieur Thiers’s communistic courts-martial, or of the New York Erie Ring—nor, indeed of any representative, or, other body, which hides its deeds and decisions under a cloak of secrecy!

Be that as it may, the method of the examiners did not tend to reassure us, speaking collectively of the sixty of us who now awaited judgment—fifty-four of whom were pre-ordained to failure, and knew it, which certainly militated against any chance of their looking upon the preparations for their torture with a lenient 

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