ith his audience. One whom he met in the same house announced that
she would never again be happy. "What does that signify?" cried
Fleeming. "We are not here to be happy, but to be good." And the words
(as his hearer writes to me) became to her a sort of motto during life.

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,