set of men, grumbling from morning until night at their position, their prospects, their future.

Really, when I first joined, I thought them all so many Lady Dashers in disguise. I could hardly believe that such cheerful fellows should be at heart so morbidly exacerbated!

They do not, it is true, grumble at those of their own standing in the service; nor do they try to out-manoeuvre their fellows of the same department; but, third-class men are jealous of those in the second-class, second-class men of lucky “seniors,” hankering after their shoes; and all, alike envious, both individually and collectively, of other branches, unite in one compact band of martyrs against the encroachments and tyrannies of higher officialdom—considering chiefs, secretaries of state, and such like birds of ill-omen, as virtual enemies and oppressors, with whom they are bound to prosecute a perpetual guerilla warfare:—a warfare in which, alas! they are sadly over-matched.

Smith does not mind in the least—that is, as far as human nature can be magnanimous—that Robinson, of his own office, should be preferred before him, and raised to a superior grade in advance of his legitimate turn. He may, undoubtedly, believe it to bear the semblance of “hard lines” to himself personally, that he was not chosen instead; still, he puts it all down to Robinson’s wonderful luck, and his own miserable fatality, bearing his successful comrade no ill-will in consequence.

But, let Jones, of another branch, be placed in the vacancy;—just hear what Smith says then!

Words would fail to express his sentiments in the matter.

Jones, he considers, is a nincompoop, who has fed all his life on “flap-doodle,” which, as you may be aware, Lieutenant O’Brien told Peter Simple was the usual diet of fools. Jones is a man totally devoid of all moral principle. How “the authorities” could ever have selected such a person to fill so responsible a post is more than he, Smith, or any one else, can understand! And, besides, how unfair it was, to take a clerk from another and different office—and one essentially of a lower character, Smith believes—and put him “over our heads in this way,” as he says, when rehearsing his wrongs and those of his official brethren before a choice audience of the same—from which the chief is the only absentee:—it was, simply disgraceful!

Smith thinks he “will certainly resign after this,” and—he doesn’t!

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