It is very fatiguing.

It is exhausting to the intellect.
Yet he only gets eighteen hundred dollars a year.

With a brain like his, that young man could amass thousands and thousands of dollars in some other pursuit, if he chose to do it.

But no--his heart is with his country, and he will serve her as long as she has got a scrapbook left.
And I know clerks that don't know how to write very well, but such knowledge as they possess they nobly lay at the feet of their country, and toil on and suffer for twenty-five hundred dollars a year.

What they write has to be written over again by other clerks sometimes; but when a man has done his best for his country, should his country complain?
Then there are clerks that have no clerkships, and are waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a vacancy--waiting patiently for a chance to help their country out--and while they are waiting, they only get barely two thousand dollars a year for it.