(Illustrations by W. Van R. Reynolds).

Mr. E. C. Easy, C.E., inserts as foreword to his monograph this well-known quotation from Pickwick Papers: "Tears never yet wound up a clock, or worked a steam ingen."

he goes on:

Then, and thus,

In amiable response-for I'm nothing if not of the anythingfor-an-Easy-life sort of chap-in a true, free-grant response to a request of the Secretary of the Association for a paper, "even,' as pleaded, "even if it be only about India Ink," I sat down with my "comfiest" pipe and thought long and earnestly. Two subjects readily suggested themselves and were hard to down: "The Reign of the Parallel Ruler," and "The Yonge Street Bridge Disaster, with Special Reference to the 'Long Lost Chord'," but as I realized that the Secretary best knew the Association's requirements had given me, as it were, an India inkling of the same -I duly conveyed to him a few random reminiscences upon the ink our fathers wore out. Surely, my masters, is it eligible for an elegy.

In a familiar, eat-out-of-your-hand manner, conversationallike, so as to make due clarity of a subject somewhat obscure, I proceeded as follows, and (here I may remark) the identical pen with which same was written will be put up to auction at the close of the Convention.

You will bear in mind the India ink I refer to the sort. don't you know, in vogue before the genesis of coli communi, before we had the autocrat of the autocart, before the hundred-foot tape had swept the chain off its sixty-six feet, ere chainless surveying-in the days historic, when we took a week with a half-hour plan. So I began blithely.

Not having what you might call a fair start, just here I swung off on a three-throw switch or something, and hazarded a remark or two about these plans of yore. Happen with the best of writers, what? One whole day usually went to make a survey for a border that would close, and a couple more for a title.

Nowadays, we make the most commodious border as singleminded and undemonstrative as four knitting needles laid one to the next rectangularly, with never a frothy bow-knot or sign of indecision about the corners; but the old idea was to rhapsodize about and fret them in a whirling eddy of random fuss and fancy. And those prideful, richly dowered titles, bedecked as any strutting peacock, with their reverse curves, and fantastic, festive, festoons; curlicues, cavorting roundabout as lightly as Raphael's pictured children; they were very eye-feasts, dithyrhambs in sinuous black and white. In their French curve elaboration, for pure flambuoyant beauty they ran a close second to a moving picture of a choicely romantic water-fall, or the trail of a champion skater on

keen ice doing what is technically called "the grapevine, with variations. The delineator had to draw the line somewhere, of course, but managed to get it pretty promiscuous and bountiful. And if the mantling title did not vaingloriously dominate the plan, the "North Point" did. It was always kicking up high jinks, always posing. In brief, your North Point, instead of being the outspoken, lean and grim thing of to-day, was nothing short of a ballad, your border was a roundelay and your title made a noise like a cross between a grand opera, a warwhoop, and an Aurora Borealis.

ink

But to take to the main line again. The archaic India came in long sticks, sort of aristocratic electric light carbons; scale

of hardness, 10.99; as to transverse cross-section generally circular, ofttimes square, not infrequently rectangular; or, it might be, glorying in octagonal ornamentality. The vendor handed it over to you smooth, lustrous, embellished with curious cuneiform characters in shiniest gold, or else something horrific in zoological stilllife. It was redolent of camphor or vanilla or some other scent of Araby-perhaps elsewhere-also, if you recall, seemed every whit good enough to eat. It yanked one back to the words of

Macaulay when he mentions inhaling-no, not the abhorrently vile cigarette, but

"the balmy smells of nard and cassia which the musky
"wings of the zephyr scatter through the cedared
"alleys of the Hesperides.

You paid good money for it and took it home and injected a modicum of it into your pen.

But the preliminary manipulation. By the welkin and all its planets! 'Twas fraught with woe exceeding and tribulation. No, you did not go at it with an Indian file-it was a case of circular abrasion by the wet process, for like some mining stocks it was soluble in water. Pampered laborers in the technical vineyard as you are-vain voluptuaries of to-day, satiated sybarites! all you know is how to embathe your pen in some kind of hand-me-down, buy-no-other solution, warranted by the manufacturers of even flow the which accompanied by its goose-quill stopper, and wrapped in its dainty and gratuitous serviette, its dip cork and clean rag. When you go a-lettering your nerves are steady and your hand as light as the angel shapes that bless an infant's dream. You're a spoilt lot; you've been spared the stick and brought up on the bottle. To me is it given to comprehend why Keats wrote,

"O aching time! O moments big as years!"

I understand; he wrote with the wrought ink of the dark ages. If he let his left hand know what his right hand dideth, both got a cramp. One must needs have been endowed with the gracious gifts of bodily vigor, and a sound heart. It was worse than grating a struck bushel of horse radish. But I fail to fathom why they called it India ink; it came from China. I think it must have been the original Chinese puzzle we hear about. Probably the Li Hi's were ashamed of their Chink ink. Come to ponder it over, Alphonso holds no impregnable patent on the aesthetic yet companionable, even diverting, onion labelled "Spanish." These generic terms, like proper names, are often difficult to account for. Not to be egotistical, they call me "Easy." for instance-which," as a deceased scientific writer of some note has said, "which is absurd."

You call to mind, don't you, you of the older school (as I said before), ere wireless telegraphy-in the days when engineers recked little and cared less about reinforced concrete, and did not give a hoot whether their neutral axis was situate, lying or being in the floor plate above, in the beam beneath, or in the footing under the

earth-you call to mind, don't you, the "demnition grind" in those flat saucers? Bethink yourself of the crick you used to get in the neck if you had a tracing to make in a hurry, and arrived at the office late, but found your nigrescent fluidity evaporated to a black currant jelly consistency, and when (stercoraceous oxgall and slimy soap unavailing) it was up to you to sail in, seize that little imp of darkness and slush round for a fresh brew?

It reminded you of the sign that a friend of ours who was away behind in his work put on his door: "Surveys and Plans made while you wait." Funny, wasn't it, how every table you tried was shaky, and you were fated to get your incubator (shall I call it) on a high spot, provocative of a grumbling noise like a loose dumb-bell in a barrel dragging anchor in a down-grade tunnel. Has your memory lapsed concerning that "roughy" spot that you tried-mistakenly-to strike because it seemed like something doing. Just for the nonce, ink was what you wanted, ravenblack liquid nigrification of deepest intensity. You learned to do two things at once, grind ink and grind teeth.

You would start off, patiently, pensively, with nice clean water in a scrupulously cleansed side-dish, and rub and rub (round, round and rub), sometimes whistling below your breath like the grooms do when they wield the curry comb-then grunt softly past the dirty clean water, or ten cent sugar period (round, round and rub), through the creole, or fine cut, or mud-pie stage (round, round and rub), past the sad-colored black-strap semaphore (rub and rub and rub), until at length after twenty minutes or so your product looked as Ethiopic as a burnt cork in the inside of a blind cow wallowing in a pile of soot during a heavy thunderstorm..

Pshaw a trial trip with a drawing pen produced only a dim grey line. No, more yet, keep at it! You were in a bad case. You wondered if stove polish-anything elsewould work. You chased that much-to-beexecrated, fossilized ink about that saucer like a black clown in a pigmy circus ring (rub. rub, rub). Away you went till your head swam. Talk about radius of gyration, talk

about the mulberry bush (round, round, round-rub, rub, rub). You had to hang on like a pup to a root. Watching your fist every moment or two sticking on a dead centre, with blinkers

goggled and brain reeling, you considered the chipmunk in his treadmill, going and going and arriving nowhere. "Grinding poverty" (pish, pish-tush, tush)-here was a very wealth of it.

Mind how that perverse cuff, new and iridescent in its pristine starchiness, not reversible, either-mind how it simply had to go and get in the smeary utensil and ere long impress some of its Stygian personality upon your drawing paper. The very devil. was in that ebon shaft of hard-boiled ink of the middle ages, with its undecipherable cabalistic legend in gilt. It was bewitched, it was fey.

I can even yet see the specks and motes and hairs and other aerial debris that gravitated to the saucer. In good and very sooth did it take to whiskers as naturally and enthusiastically as the Roumanian rag expert in your back lane, who yells with his mouth full, and audibly has no palate. To your utter confusion it seemed as though even came also, from the utmost bounds of the sensible and material earth, "the hair of the tail of the dog of the wild man of Borneo."

Anyway, once you attained a saturated solution, this atmospheric flotsam and jetsam would invade your pen and clog it, and in the first gust of passion make you wish you knew a most notable and clustering bunch of malevolent verbiage. Was anvthing under the vaulted cope of heaven more exasperating? This old-time blacklead was as the fabled course of true love--it ne'er did run smooth, and probably not of it was written, "dark as midnight was the flow."

Then the oxgall pot would be seized-that epitome, that concentrated essence of odorous abomination-and you would surcharge your refractory dusky dye with an adult's dose of the contaminated run-easy.

You said in your heart. "All Gaul is divided into three parts, each smellier than the rest.' The trouble, this time. was each line got more than the lion's share of the blessed paleolithic ink.

One of the saddest things in life then was the realization that my chief, a man grown, with an academic thermometer registering two Old Country degrees (one of them a Dublin one-Dublin, where no dubs come from), that the chief, I say, could imagine how anybody could grind ink till his hand trembled like a cornstalk riding out a gale, and then possibly form letters without antlers growing on them. Your pen, like the heathen, stumbled in inky darkness.

If so be it were a border you were afflicted with, it evolved a strange, unnatural Virginia creeper mis en scene. The pen ex