'a terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun-
boats 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