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+Project Gutenberg's The Boyhood of Great Inventors, by A. Fraser Robertson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Boyhood of Great Inventors
+
+Author: A. Fraser Robertson
+
+Release Date: December 3, 2011 [EBook #38191]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT INVENTORS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Anna Whitehead, eagkw and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT INVENTORS
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: THE EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE.
+  _Frontispiece._]
+
+
+
+
+  _The Boyhood of
+  Great Inventors_
+
+  BY
+
+  A. FRASER ROBERTSON
+
+  AUTHOR OF "EARLY YEARS OF SOME NOBLE LIVES"
+
+  NEW EDITION
+
+  _LONDON_
+  JOHN F. SHAW AND CO.
+  48, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
+
+
+
+
+  _UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME._
+
+
+  THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT INVENTORS    A. FRASER ROBERTSON.
+  TWILIGHT STORIES                  CATHARINE SHAW.
+  FOR LOVE AND DUTY                 FRANK SAVILLE.
+  THE BOYS OF ALL SAINTS            MABEL MACKINTOSH.
+  DARING DEEDS                      FRANK SAVILLE.
+  MIDSHIPMITE CURLY                 DR. GORDON STABLES.
+  THE DOG CRUSOE                    R. M. BALLANTYNE.
+  THE SWORD OF THE CAREWS           DUNCAN MCLAREN.
+  THE NUGGET FINDERS                H. ALGER.
+  ROBIN HOOD & HIS BRAVE FORESTERS  S. PERCY.
+  MARTIN RATTLER                    R. M. BALLANTYNE.
+  THE KING'S MESSENGER              L. MARSTON.
+  FOUR, AND WHAT THEY DID           H. CAMPBELL.
+  FOR WANT OF A WORD                M. MACKINTOSH.
+  FOR ELSIE'S SAKE                  J. CHAPPELL.
+  CURLEY'S CRYSTAL                  EMMA MARSHALL.
+  IN SHADOWLAND                     E. EVERETT-GREEN.
+  ROB AND MAG                       L. MARSTON.
+  THAT BOY TOM                      ISMAY THORN.
+  TIM'S TREASURE                    ALICE LANG.
+  LITTLE BOOTS                      J. HARRISON.
+  CLEMENT AND GEORDIE               EMMA MARSHALL.
+  GOLD THAT GLITTERS                E. S. HOLT.
+  PETER'S PROMISES                  EMMA MARSHALL.
+  MOLLIE WYNTER                     M. MACKINTOSH.
+  THE SLAVE GIRL OF POMPEII         E. S. HOLT.
+  MISS PRIMROSE                     AGNES GIBERNE.
+  MAB'S BURDENS                     E. BODDY.
+  BESIDE ALL WATERS                 M. L. ASTREE.
+  WATCHING FOR THE KING             L. MARSTON.
+  NAN, THE CIRCUS GIRL              FRANCES STRATTON
+  HOW THE TIDE TURNED               S. WATSON.
+  A BROTHER'S RANSOM                ALICE LANG.
+  LITTLE EYEBRIGHT                  AGNES GIBERNE.
+  A LITTLE CURIOSITY                EMMA MARSHALL.
+  MADCAP MARIGOLD                   MABEL MACKINTOSH.
+  THE GOLDEN PAVEMENT               E. CHAPMAN.
+  A WAIF OF THE WAVES               S. WATSON.
+  CHRISTOPHER'S NEW HOME            EMMA MARSHALL.
+  HIRA'S QUEST                      L. MARSTON.
+  FROGGY'S LITTLE BROTHER           BRENDA.
+
+  LONDON: JOHN F. SHAW & CO.,
+  48, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS.
+
+
+                        PAGE
+  JOHN SMEATON             9
+  JOHN FLAXMAN            30
+  SIR HUMPHREY DAVY       48
+  SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT   67
+  JOSIAH WEDGWOOD         83
+  GEORGE STEPHENSON      102
+  THOMAS ALVA EDISON     118
+  JAMES WATT             141
+
+
+
+
+THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT INVENTORS
+
+
+
+
+JOHN SMEATON.
+
+
+People who have been on a long sea voyage, and have ended by sailing up
+the English Channel, tell us how their hearts beat high, after weary
+weeks and months at sea, when the cry went up while as yet land was
+a mere shadowy outline, "The Eddystone in sight!" For the gleaming
+lighthouse standing immovable in the midst of boiling waves and great
+mountains of blinding white spray spells "home" to the voyager.
+
+To us the "stone" round which the waters ceaselessly churn and "eddy"
+speaks of John Smeaton, the man who built it. The great engineer has
+been in his grave now for more than a century, but his most lasting
+monument stood for longer than that time firm as a rock.
+
+John Smeaton was born in 1724, near Leeds. Not the Leeds of to-day--a
+bustling, smoky centre of manufacture--but a quaint little town hemmed
+in by green country fields and lanes. It was in one of these that
+Austhorpe Lodge stood, the house of Smeaton's father, a lawyer in Leeds.
+
+We shall yet come across many boyhoods tinged with shadow and struggle,
+and are not sorry to find this one happy, fondly tended, and bright with
+sunshine. There was no pinch in the lot of the Smeatons, no grinding
+poverty that we sometimes find to spur a boy to manhood before his time.
+Little John was cradled, as it were, in love. As a child his parents
+taught him at home. He was not eager to mix with other boys in outdoor
+romp or play, and very early, while yet hardly more than a baby, he
+showed a strong love for pulling his toys to pieces to see what they
+were made of! Never was he happier than when he could get hold of a
+cutting-tool with which to shape toy pumps and houses and windmills.
+Another amusement of his babyhood was to divide squares and circles!
+
+As a boy he was rather quiet and thoughtful, though his tongue
+straightway loosed the moment anything in the shape of a workman came
+to his father's house. He was then always to be found on the spot, and
+with eager eyes fixed on their every movement, he would unconsciously
+"pose" them with eager questions--such questions as from the boyish
+lips made them shake their heads and stare at him dumb and stupid.
+
+And all the time the boyish brain was deeply plotting, and it was ever
+that he might "go and do likewise." One day, after watching a millwright
+at work, his anxious parents were alarmed by the sight of their boy
+perched on the top of the barn fastening a windmill to the roof! At
+another time, when a pump was being made in the village, by good luck a
+piece of bored lead came in little John's way. He promptly set to work
+and made a toy one after the pattern of the big one, and even managed to
+make it raise water.
+
+But his greatest childish feat took place on his discovering a
+fire-engine being erected at a colliery in the village to pump the water
+out of the mine. He was constantly on the spot, eagerly watching it as
+it slowly progressed, and quickly his boyish brain grasped the whole.
+
+He went home and began with trembling fingers one day to copy it. His
+father had given him an outhouse with bench and tools to carry out his
+hobby, and soon the engine worked. He looked round to see what he could
+use it upon, and espied the fish-pond. So he began to pump out the water
+till he had pumped the whole place dry. When his father came home it was
+to find an empty pond, and all his fish lying dead at the bottom!
+
+And now John had to leave his beloved workshop for school in Leeds.
+And there it seemed as if the boy showed up quite a different side of
+himself. The bright, eager alertness that marked him at home or with the
+workmen about Austhorpe was gone. He was quiet with the boys--out of his
+element. He did not care for their rough play. He was like a fish out of
+water. Silent, shy, even stupid--the boys nicknamed him "Fooley
+Smeaton."
+
+But though he might be dull at school, the boy's real education was
+surely going on at home among his pumps and model engines, his lathes
+and chisels.
+
+The boyish hands had begun to do that which all through life threw over
+him a very spell of fascination--_to construct_--to build up. The baby
+fingers were learning how to use tools in a way that was to give him
+one day, long years after, a skill that would place him on the very
+top of the ladder. And all the time the young mind was pondering great
+mechanical principles that were by-and-by to make the name of John
+Smeaton famed throughout the world. So it was not to games and boyish
+play that he gave his spare moments, but to his workshop. When he was
+fifteen he could use his turning-lathe to turn wood and ivory. When he
+was eighteen he could handle tools as deftly and cleverly as any workman
+who all his life had known no other trade.
+
+When he was sixteen he left school and took his place in his father's
+office, and tried to bring his mind to look forward to law as his
+life-work. He worked conscientiously day after day, coming home at
+evening to spend half the night in working--making--constructing things.
+He had all the instincts of a born mechanic. It was almost as if he
+could not help it.
+
+When his father sent him to London to study law, the boy tried again
+to stifle his longings, and to set himself to carry out his father's
+wishes. But strive and struggle as he would, it was impossible to crush
+the desire of his heart. And so one day he sat down and wrote to his
+father that he could go on with law no longer. Nothing except to be a
+mechanic would satisfy him. His father, deeply disappointed though he
+was, quietly made up his mind to what could not be helped, and wrote to
+John that he must make his own choice.
+
+The boy was delighted. He had chosen what was then the work of a common
+labourer, with a labourer's wages. The term Civil Engineer was unknown.
+With a heart beating high with hope he went off and engaged himself
+to a philosophical instrument-maker--a man who made instruments for
+navigation and astronomy. With him he worked steadily--eager to improve
+the instruments--eager to improve himself--so eager, indeed, that he
+divided out his time so as to make the most of it: so much for reading,
+so much for experiments, so much for business, and so much for rest and
+relaxation.
+
+And so on the threshold of manhood--having got, as it were, "a free
+hand"--he made great strides onward. He may not have done much business
+at the time, but he read papers before the Royal Society, and he kept
+open a keen, mechanical eye for everything--from minute, delicate
+instruments to the building of canals and bridges and waterworks. He
+thought no trouble too great to take if so it made him thorough. He set
+himself to study French and Italian, so as to read the works in these
+languages on mechanical subjects, and he even set off to Holland--that
+land of dykes and harbours and docks--that he might examine them for
+himself.
+
+And while he looked about him, always at the same time busy with the
+work that lay nearest to his hand, the great work of his life was
+drawing close to his door.
+
+Many years before Smeaton lived, England was in the custom of lighting
+up her rocky headlands with lights or beacons. First came "the candle in
+the cottage window" to light the sailor husband home, then stacks of
+blazing wood, piles of coal, oil, torches, pitch-pots. Guided by these
+flaring lights in the darkness, men and vessels plying round our coast
+were saved from shipwreck and death. Sometimes these beacons, flaming
+high from their pinnacles, warned the people inland that war was
+expected, the country was in danger of being invaded, or that pirates
+were about to swoop down upon them. At other times _false_ lights were
+shown by men known as "wreckers," and homeward-bound vessels, rich in
+goods and human souls, were dashed upon the rocks. So our coasts were
+lighted up in those old days, but it happened at times that the pitch
+would become drenched and drowned, the wood and coal fires would spurt
+up for a space and then drop down and fade. Things were uncertain. It
+did not matter, perhaps, greatly, as long as England's commerce by sea
+was small, but when our trade with foreign lands began to grow, there
+grew, too, the question how best to light our rocky coasts and docks and
+headlands. So an order of monks--the Brethren of Trinity House--was
+made, and these prayed for the safety of the sailors, and later looked
+to the lighting of the coast.
+
+Eddystone rock we can easily find on the map, a low, black reef lying
+S.S.W. of Plymouth, a place of lurking danger as well for ships cruising
+up and down the Channel as for those coming into Plymouth harbour.
+In the days of Smeaton, and for some time earlier, the way in which
+lighthouses were built was for a private man to go to the owner and say,
+"I will build a lighthouse on that rock if you will let me." If his
+offer were accepted and he carried out the work he had then the right to
+levy dues on the ships that passed, or, in other words, to make them
+pay toll. In this way he sometimes collected quite a large income.
+
+Towards the end of the seventeenth century a man called Winstanley
+undertook to build a lighthouse on Eddystone. He drew out plans and
+started on the work, and it was no light work. The base of the rock was
+narrow and sloping. It was hard to make the foundations fast, for winds
+and waves had a way of rising suddenly, and the whole of the work would
+be drowned for the time, and perhaps many of the materials swept away.
+But by dint of waiting patiently for fine weather and smooth water
+the building was at last finished. It was made of wood, rather in an
+ornamental style, and had many projections. It took four years in the
+building, for although in other parts of the Channel the waters might be
+smooth enough, yet round the Eddystone they were almost sure to seethe
+and foam. For several seasons the building stood.
+
+"I wish," exclaimed the builder one day, elated that his work had turned
+out so well, "that I might be here in the fiercest storm, just to see it
+stand."
+
+After it had stood some three years from its finish Winstanley went out
+one day to see to some repairs. He remained on the rock overnight, and
+during the night his wish, though hardly as he would have had it, was
+fulfilled. A gale and storm terrific in their fury burst overhead and
+broke along the English coast. With the first streak of dawn an anxious
+people looked from shore to see how it fared with the lighthouse. Not a
+trace of it remained. Not a speck was to be seen on the waters. It and
+its maker had been utterly swept away!
+
+Next came a man called Rudyerd, who volunteered to build a lighthouse
+that would stand. He pondered the last, and he came to the conclusion
+that it had failed in form. He determined to alter that. So he made
+a long, high column in the shape of a cone, with no ornaments, no
+projections jutting out to catch the wind, and at the end of four years
+the thing was finished--a wooden building coated over with oakum and
+pitch.
+
+For a time all went seemingly well. It held four rooms, one above the
+other. The lantern was lit by candles. Years went on, and still it
+stood defying the winds and storms for half a century. There were two
+light-keepers, who snuffed the candles overnight, sitting up for four
+hours at a time. One of these men fell ill and died. A storm was raging
+at the time. No help could come to his companion, and so through a long
+month he kept the body, afraid to throw it into the sea, in case he
+should be thought a murderer.
+
+At last help came from shore, but the loneliness and horror had told so
+terribly upon the remaining man that ever afterwards three men were
+employed to keep the light burning, in case of one falling ill or dying.
+
+But in spite of its long standing there was a hidden flaw in the
+lighthouse. It was inflammable--capable of catching fire. One day--no
+one could quite tell how it happened, it might be the flame had dried
+and scorched the timber. At any rate, a man going in to snuff the
+candles found that fire had broken out. It wanted but a few minutes till
+the place was in flames. The men rushed below, while a perfect rain of
+beams and burning lead fell in showers about their heads. Seeing the
+blaze from the shore a boat put off with all speed. When it reached the
+rock it found the men, not on the rock, but crouching beneath a ledge,
+dripping and half dead, and with just enough life in them to enable them
+to catch the rope thrown to them, for it was too rough for the boat to
+reach the rock. And so they were towed on board.
+
+And now the third attempt at the lighthouse was to be made by John
+Smeaton.
+
+"Thou art the man to do it," were the words of the letter asking him to
+undertake the work. And so Smeaton was launched on that which was to
+make his name famous.
+
+The first step he took was to get and study the plans of the former men.
+To succeed he had first to find out where the others had failed.
+
+The first building had failed in weight. The second had not been
+fire-proof. And so he decided to make his lighthouse of stone. People
+when they heard of it called out that it was a wild project. It could
+not be done. "Nothing but wood could possibly stand on the Eddystone."
+But Smeaton was in no way moved or cast down. What he made he wanted to
+stand, and not to last for a few years merely; and so of stone he
+determined it should be.
+
+He began to draw out the design. He kept to the shape of Rudyerd's--the
+long cone-like column. He made the diameter of the foundation broader.
+He planned the locking and bonding and dovetailing of the stones--each
+to each, and all to the centre. When this was all carefully thought and
+made out he started from London for Plymouth. He was _six days_ on the
+journey owing to the "badness of the roads."
+
+On the 2nd of April he set sail for the rock, but winds and waves beat
+so vehemently that he found it impossible to land. All he could do was
+to view the low, treacherous black thing on which he was to build his
+house of stone. Back he went three days later, and for the first time
+he stood on Eddystone, but only for a couple of hours. There was almost
+nothing to be seen, only one or two iron branches left from the wrecks
+of the former wooden buildings. On the third attempt he made he could
+not even see the rock. Spray and foam hid it entirely from view. In
+the same way his fourth and fifth visits failed, but his sixth was
+successful, and he landed at low water, and in the stillness of the
+evening made his first measurements.
+
+"I went on with my business till nine in the evening," he wrote, "having
+worked an hour by candlelight."
+
+Again and again he tried to get a landing. Sometimes he managed it, at
+others it was impossible. After having spent fifteen hours in all on the
+rock he went back to London, and with his own expert hands made a model.
+The work took him two months in all, and that proficiency that he had
+learned as a boy in his little workshop at Austhorpe stood him in good
+stead now. After this he set out for Plymouth again. No detail of his
+work was too small for him to attend to himself. He visited the quarries
+where the stones were to be hewn. He carefully chose the kind of cement
+that was to bind them together; the workmen, the work-yards, the ships
+that were to carry the stones to the rock. Each and all passed under his
+eye.
+
+It was a great day when, in August, 1756, he and his men started for
+Eddystone, and the master fixed the centre and laid down the lines. Now
+the work might be said to be fairly begun. But was ever work so often
+broken in upon? Winds and waves are not to be counted on--least of all
+about the stormy Eddystone, for often though the water is calm and
+smooth in other places, it smothers in foam the low black reef.
+
+There were times when the workmen could work as long as six hours at a
+stretch, going on eagerly by torchlight if necessary. Again it would
+happen they could not work more than two hours out of the twenty-four.
+Time was precious, and time was grievously taken up in going to and
+from Plymouth, and so Smeaton arranged that a "buss"--a fishing-vessel
+with two masts and a cabin at either end--should ride at anchor near the
+scene of work, with provisions and other necessaries.
+
+But here, again, it was hard to plan ahead. One day a mighty storm
+arose. The men could not work. Their yawl broke from its moorings. They
+could neither send to shore, nor could they get help. But they must eat.
+Days passed, and gradually their store of provisions grew less and less.
+By the time relief reached them they were at their last crust.
+
+During the long months of winter when work was out of the question the
+time was spent in dressing the stones in the yard on shore. Smeaton
+himself saw them laid out in lines and numbered, after which they were
+put in order on board ready to be lifted off when the rock was reached,
+and easily put in their places. Dangers and difficulties often crowded
+thick on the work, enough to daunt a man less dauntless than Smeaton.
+One night on the homeward way a big storm arose.
+
+The night was dark, and Smeaton was roused from sleep by the sound of
+much stamping and hurrying to and fro overhead. He rushed on deck in
+his nightshirt. The helmsman was holding frantically by a rope.
+
+"For God's sake," he shouted when he saw Smeaton and others, "heave hard
+at that rope, if you mean to save your lives."
+
+So Smeaton as well as the others laid hold. In the pitchy darkness there
+fell on their horror-struck ears the sound of waves breaking on the
+_rocks_. The jibsail was blown to pieces. They hastily lowered the
+mainsail. The waves dashed over them. But gradually the ship obeyed the
+straining helm and rounded off. In anxious fear they lay out to sea.
+When morning broke land was nowhere to be seen, and they found
+themselves driving towards the Bay of Biscay. For four long days they
+were tossed and driven to and fro before they made Plymouth harbour.
+
+One day Smeaton had an accident, which, however, might have been worse
+in its effects. He was taking a turn up and down the narrow strip of
+rock that was all that afforded a promenade when his foot slipped and he
+fell among the rocks. When he got up he thought himself unhurt till a
+stinging pain informed him that he had dislocated his thumb. He was
+hours from shore--far from a surgeon. Delay meant disablement. So he
+took hold of it with his other hand, pulled hard, and it snapped into
+place.
+
+But in spite of danger and difficulty and hindrance the great work
+went on, though slowly still surely. By the end of the second year the
+building had risen thirty-five feet high--out of reach of the heavy dash
+and thud of the waves. Gradually one above another rose the rooms for
+the light-keepers--their walls twenty-six inches thick to stand against
+the fearful onslaught of the wind as it blew up the Channel from the
+Atlantic. For in a gale the place shook and the doors slammed and the
+windows rattled with such terrific force that the new and unaccustomed
+keepers earnestly wished themselves at Land's End or anywhere else, so
+that it meant land.
+
+To say that as it neared the finish it was much in the great builder's
+thoughts is to draw but a faint picture of how day and night it lay upon
+his heart. How when on land the early morning found him out betimes on
+the Hoe, at Plymouth, telescope in hand, gazing out to sea. If a storm
+raged and the spray flew high for a moment it seemed to his sinking
+heart that it was Winstanley's lighthouse over again and that there was
+no Eddystone!
+
+Again his heart leaped in gratitude a moment afterwards when the upright
+column--strong, firm, immovable--pointing black and clear against the
+sky, came to view, and a deep "Thank God!" would burst from his lips.
+
+And now the months flew by and the great work neared its end. Smeaton
+himself chose the last details--the iron railings--the glass for the
+lantern. In the upper storeroom directly beneath the ceiling he had the
+motto carved--"Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that
+build it." And the mason's last work was a "Laus Deo" in stone.
+
+Towards the end Smeaton could not leave it. With his own hands he
+fitted the windows in their sashes--fixed the gilt ball on the top--no
+easy matter--but he had ever filled the post of danger himself. He
+asked no one to put himself where he was not willing too to go. Expert
+as any skilled mechanic, he himself gave his great work its finishing
+touches. Twenty-four candles in a chandelier formed the light. The
+lightning-conductor was fixed--the rooms finished. The magnificent
+column towered to seventy feet, the lantern and gilt ball twenty-eight
+inches higher, and on October 16th, 1759, the work was done.
+
+Three years later a mighty storm broke along the coast, wrecking docks
+and ships and harbours, but the Eddystone stood firm.
+
+And now Smeaton's name was made. Other feats followed. Other triumphs
+awaited him--the building of docks and harbours and bridges--but the
+thing that men will ever link with his name is the Eddystone. After the
+stress and struggle of public life, he went back again to the old home
+of his boyhood. He gathered again about him his workshop, his study, his
+observatory. And so he worked to the end. He could not help it. He could
+not live without his tools.
+
+Great man though he was, his wants were very few and simple. Offers of
+riches and magnificence had no power to tempt him, and when he refused a
+post abroad which meant wealth and position, the Russian Princess who
+offered it exclaimed, in wondering admiration--
+
+"I shall go back to Russia and tell them there is one man who has _not_
+his price."
+
+He was happiest in the quiet of his own home. As a boy he had been
+rather retiring and thoughtful. As a man he was found the same. Simple,
+modest, while he would converse easily on other subjects, it was hardly
+possible to get him to talk of self. In this, as well as in his
+life-work, "he was indeed a very great man."
+
+He had had a long life of work--hard, incessant toil--from six to sixty,
+though it had been work that he had loved. It may be he had overtaxed
+his strength, for as age crept on he grew less robust. In his
+sixty-eighth year he had a slight stroke. He feared a gradually clouding
+brain. "The shadow must lengthen as the sun goes down," he said to
+himself. But this distress was spared those dear to him, and with not
+much suffering, on the 28th October, 1792, he passed away. They buried
+him in the old church of Whitkirk, and raised a tablet to his memory,
+naming in it that great work of his that will "convey to distant ages,
+as it does to every nation of the globe, the name of its constructor."
+
+The world looks still upon John Smeaton as a wonderful engineer--a great
+mechanic--a man who climbed to the top of his profession, and the sound
+of whose fame spread over Europe; but he will ever be best remembered by
+the light of the Eddystone, that memorial monument that stood firm for
+more than a century, sometimes hid in blinding spray, anon gleaming out
+clear and steady, a rescuer from shipwreck and death.
+
+Till 1877 storms continued to beat upon it without avail. Then, owing to
+the undermining of a portion of the reef, it was thought well to build a
+new house on another part of the rock. The old base still stands on the
+old place, and the upper rooms have been put on the Hoe at Plymouth.
+
+These are, after all, the best monuments we could have of the builder.
+Welded into the stones, it seems to us we can trace, not alone genius
+and great mechanical power, but a patience in difficulty, a courage in
+danger, and in face of long, wearing months of anxiety. It is these,
+perhaps, more than all else, for which we honour the name of Smeaton.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN FLAXMAN
+
+
+Had we passed along one of the poorer streets of the city of London some
+150 years ago, we might have chanced on a humble shop displaying in the
+window plaster-casts and figures in clay, and had we lifted the latch
+and entered, in the cramped space behind the counter we should have
+found the child who was one day to become England's greatest sculptor,
+John Flaxman.
+
+A ricketty, weakly baby in a high stuffed child's chair, so that his
+little pale face might be on a level with the counter; the sweet dreamy
+eyes looked out on the world, all unthinking that a day was coming when
+the fame of his name would reach wherever men knew and loved his art.
+
+Born in the city of York in 1755, a few months before the Flaxmans
+settled in London, there were times when his father and mother hardly
+believed they would be able to "rear" the delicate child. Attacks of
+illness and weakness were common to him. Indeed, one day he was seized
+with a fit of gasping so severe that the breath seemed to leave his
+body, and they even laid him out for dead, but he revived, and his
+breath came again, and by-and-by he even grew. Few amusements, no
+childish games were open to the little cripple. The green fields, the
+blue of the country skies were to him things unknown. The dingy four
+walls of the narrow cramped shop had to serve him instead. But day by
+day he grew quick to note the familiar beauty of his father's casts. He
+came to see the shape of these white things with the eye of the poet and
+the artist. There came into his mind the strong desire to copy, inborn
+in most children, and the baby fingers set to work to mould, and
+fashion, and make some likeness--if even a dim one--to those of his
+father's models. In these old days gentlemen were accustomed to wear
+bunches of seals dangling from their watch-chains, and the child used to
+keep a stock of wax, and when he thought a customer seemed kind, he
+would summon courage to ask him to let him take the impression on the
+soft wax.
+
+In little John's early years, when he was as yet a baby of five, a great
+ceremony took place in London, the coronation of King George III.
+Rumour went that to celebrate the great event there was to be a
+coronation medal struck, and that hundreds of these were to be thrown to
+the crowd. The cripple child in the dingy side street of the great city
+set his little heart on possessing one of these treasures, and begged
+his father to get him one. But Flaxman was not successful. On the way
+home, with his mind full of his disappointment, his eye happened to
+light on a plated button on the pavement, stamped with a horse and
+jockey. He picked it up. Would he disappoint his little son, or deceive
+him? He decided on deceiving him, and gave the eager and expectant child
+the button. The boy received the trophy in wonderment. He was glad to
+get it, but he remarked that it seemed a strange medal for a coronation!
+
+Customers who came to Flaxman's house could hardly help noticing the
+child who sat behind the counter, the big head on the lame body, the
+high shoulders, the beautiful pure eyes, the sensitive, proud face. They
+spoke to him, and they found him no common child.
+
+One day, by good luck, when little John was hardly more than seven, a
+customer, a Mr. Matthew, a clergyman, came to Flaxman's shop. Writing
+of that visit, when it had become a memory and the child a great man,
+Mr. Matthew says--
+
+"I went to the shop of old Flaxman to have a figure repaired, and whilst
+I was standing there I heard a child cough behind the counter. I looked
+over, and there I saw a little boy seated on a small chair, with a large
+chair before him, on which lay a book he was reading. His fine eyes and
+beautiful forehead interested me, and I said, 'What book is that?' He
+raised himself on his crutches, bowed, and said, 'Sir, it is a Latin
+book, and I am trying to learn it.'
+
+"'Aye, indeed!' I answered. 'You are a fine boy, but this is not the
+proper book. I will bring you a right one to-morrow.'
+
+"I did as I promised, and the acquaintance thus casually begun ripened
+into one of the best friendships of my life."
+
+It is a picture! The child of seven trying patiently to make out his
+Latin book--his weakly frame on one chair, the unwieldy volume spread
+out before him on another. The beautiful eyes and brow, the winning
+smile, and the long, brown hair curling to the shoulders.
+
+But the wheel of his fortune seemed as if it had got a turn. Mr.
+Matthew was as good as his word, and brought him the promised book, and
+more followed. Translations of old Greek fables and stories from Homer
+that stirred the imagination of the boy. Then followed the fascinating
+adventures of Don Quixote. These fired his brain. How great and how
+heroic it seemed to him to rescue maidens in distress, to set the
+wrongs of the world right. So strong a hold did the thought take of the
+imagination of the child that one day, hobbling on his little crutches,
+he started off for Hyde Park in the hope that he might perchance find
+some forlorn maiden in need of his protection! But no old-world lady of
+the kind did he happen on among the thousands of teeming London--either
+in the Park or Kensington Gardens--and he had to come home cast down and
+disappointed.
+
+Meantime he strove and worked and laboured in his own childish way--with
+perhaps no great present results--receiving now and then even a check
+from which the sensitive mind recoiled, as when one day he showed an
+artist a drawing of a human eye, to be met with the quizzical question,
+"Is that an oyster?" Perhaps more secretly after that, but still as
+perseveringly as ever, he worked.
+
+Long years after, a friend gazing on these early works was struck with
+proofs of his diligence as a child, and asked him how he had managed to
+do them.
+
+"Sir," Flaxman answered, "we are never too young to learn what is
+useful, or too old to grow wise and good."
+
+When he was about ten years old a better gift than any fortune could
+bestow was granted to him. The feebleness of childhood seemed to leave
+him. The sickly frame seemed suddenly to knit itself together. The
+weakly limbs gradually strengthened, and the boy was able to throw away
+his crutches.
+
+No need now to sit solitary in the cramped little shop behind the
+counter, dreaming lonely day-dreams and fashioning his models all by
+himself. With new strength a new life was opening up to him--or rather
+the old life grew day by day transformed and beautified.
+
+It was Mrs. Matthew, the wife of his friend the clergyman, who first
+drew the boy from his life of loneliness. She was touched and interested
+in him, and she asked him to her house. He went and he went again.
+He met there men who fired his smouldering longing one day to be a
+sculptor--to do some great thing in the world of art. Mrs. Matthew
+had many friends among such. At other times he spent evenings not
+less delightful when she herself read aloud from Virgil and Homer
+soul-stirring tales of ancient heroes--and the boy sat by drinking in
+the poetry while he tried with eager, untaught fingers to draw some of
+the passages that took his fancy. Again she would lay aside her book and
+talk to him of the wonders of sculpture, while there sprang up in his
+heart a great longing amounting almost to a passion.
+
+No wonder these were golden hours, full of pleasure to young John, and
+looked back upon many a time in after years as among the happiest times
+of his life.
+
+A gentleman, seeing some of these boyish attempts, gave the boy an order
+for a set of drawings, and by and by more orders followed.
+
+When he was eleven years old he left the privacy and quiet of the little
+side eddy of the stream of life in which he had been living and struck
+out, as it were, into the mid-stream. That year he won a prize from the
+Society of Arts for models of figures in clay. Two years later he was
+again successful. What we know as the Royal Academy then first came into
+being, and when it was in its second year, and when Flaxman was only
+fifteen years old, he exhibited models there. Step by step, small steps
+at first, he was entering on the beginning of that which for long had
+been the desire of his heart. In the same year he entered as an Academy
+student, and won the silver medal. People already were beginning to
+acknowledge his outstanding ability. Rewards, prizes came upon him one
+by one. The boy's outlook was beginning to be very bright, and his heart
+was beginning to beat high with hope, when just as he had reached the
+age of sixteen he got an unexpected check.
+
+He made up his mind to try for the gold medal--the highest reward of
+merit--and among all the students he was generally allowed to have the
+best chance. Hardly a fellow-student but felt sure that he would get
+it. "Flaxman! Flaxman!" they cried almost unanimously, for they were
+strongly impressed with the skill and ability of the grave, reserved
+boy. Speaking of this time in later years Flaxman said--
+
+"I had made up my mind that I was to win.... It was given by Reynolds to
+Engleheart. I burst into tears. This sharp lesson humbled my conceit,
+and I determined to redouble my exertions...."
+
+May he perhaps have over-estimated his own skill? Years after he said of
+himself--
+
+"I was the most conceited artist of the day." And yet where another
+might have been downcast he refused to be discouraged. He was upheld
+by a strong and silent sense of power within him. He went home to his
+father, and he said, "Give me time, and I will yet produce works which
+the Academy will be proud to acknowledge."
+
+Engleheart, the winner of the medal, was never heard of in later life,
+while the loser made for himself a name that afterwards "waxed wide."
+
+Now he worked harder than ever. He studied, he exhibited, he moulded, he
+designed the figure for a statue of Alexander the Great, which brought
+him some fame. But his father could not keep him, and he was driven
+to look about and bethink himself how he could keep himself. At this
+time--the most needy, perhaps, of his life--a door seemed to open to
+him. He fell in with the great Staffordshire potter, Josiah Wedgwood,
+and Wedgwood, with that keen eye of his ever on the outlook to discover
+talent, instantly recognised it in the boy.
+
+A great time was beginning for pottery. For ages hideous things had
+adorned people's houses and tables till Wedgwood arose, and there
+entered his great mind the idea of making common things beautiful, of
+giving people something to look at, even at their meals, that would
+raise their tastes and be a sort of education. After Wedgwood discovered
+young Flaxman he gave him some orders. The boy threw his whole soul into
+the work. Not that it was such work as always showed the artist at his
+best. The sculptor had first to make the model in wax. Then a mould was
+taken of this, and into this the potter's stuff, soft as dough, was
+carefully pressed. The thing was not finished yet. It remained for it
+still to be fired and polished, and so it is not wonderful if some of
+the delicacy and finish of the first design may have been occasionally
+lost.
+
+But with Flaxman's work Wedgwood was satisfied, and while he worked hard
+for him he paid him handsomely. It was not the sort of thing to bring
+him name and fame, but there was always the need to live to be faced,
+and he bravely took what offered and was thankful. And by living simply
+and saving where he could, he managed to keep himself by what he made.
+He faced this time of drudgery quietly and patiently, bringing to bear
+upon its hardships something of that serene spirit that belonged to him
+all through life.
+
+He gave to Wedgwood, as far as in him lay, of his best. Models of the
+four seasons, models of the ancient gods and goddesses--those deities
+whose stories were familiar to him from his childhood, Juno, Jupiter,
+Minerva, Apollo--models of vases. And besides these, chimney-pieces,
+plaques, candlesticks, inkstands, anything and everything, for Wedgwood
+held that a common teapot or a jug might be still a thing of beauty. For
+the models of the ancient gods he would get perhaps 10_s._ each, and for
+a pair of vases as much as L3 3_s._
+
+Some of these were so exquisitely done that Wedgwood said more than
+once, "It really hurts me to think of parting with these gems."
+
+Long years afterwards, when he had reached the top of the tree, Flaxman
+used to find endless pleasure in talking of these humble labours.
+
+And all this time he was leading a very quiet life. That strong thirst
+for knowledge that had always been his, spurred him on to learn all
+he could. So during the day he worked at casts and models, and in
+the evenings he sketched or turned to his beloved poets. Either he
+preferred the old Greek poets' company to that of living friends, or
+it might be that the slight deformity that was his through life--the
+high shoulders, the sidling gait--left him shy and sensitive, and in
+a measure inclined to creep into his shell.
+
+Looking over the huge portfolio of Flaxman's drawings that one can
+still see to-day, it is easy to discover where he went for most of his
+subjects. The poets came in for their share, and also history and
+portraits, but his great delight was to produce scenes from the Bible
+and the _Pilgrim's Progress_, "The Marys at the Sepulchre," "The Flight
+into Egypt," "The Angels round the Cradle of Christ."
+
+But although he was getting to be known among men of talent he was still
+poor and struggling. It is proof enough of this for us to read how at
+this time he made his busts half life-size and of clay, whereas had he
+been rich they would surely have been full-size and of marble. About
+this time he began to talk of what had been with him till now a secret
+longing. It was to see Rome. The desire had been long growing in his
+heart. To Rome sculptors and painters flock, for it is the great city of
+sculpture and painting, and to a sculptor it is as if his education were
+unfinished, so long as his eyes have not feasted on those beautiful
+examples of art.
+
+"If I remain here," he said sadly, "I shall be accused of ignorance
+concerning those noble works of art which are to the sculptor what
+learning is to a man of genius."
+
+About this time he took what seemed a foolish step, looking alone to the
+progress of his art. He married. Sir Joshua, the President of the Royal
+Academy, who had _not_ given him the gold medal, met him in the street
+one day and stopped him. "Ha! Flaxman," he said, "I have heard that you
+have married. I tell you you are ruined for an artist. You cannot now go
+to Rome to study the great sculptors of antiquity."
+
+Young Flaxman went home downcast. Not to go to Rome! Not to realise his
+boyhood's golden dreams and his life's ambition!
+
+He told his wife what had happened. She met him with the brave reply,
+"You will e'en go to Rome and I will accompany you. We must work and
+economise."
+
+And now for the next five weary years this brave young couple put
+their shoulders to the wheel. She kept house and he worked--harder
+than ever--for Wedgwood chiefly--toiling for long hours, but upheld
+all the time by the thought of the goal to which he was straining.
+That journey to Rome!--the very thought of it made all hardship easy.
+He turned out much beautiful work for Wedgwood at this time. Groups of
+children--romping, skipping, playing "blind man's buff."
+
+Nothing that meant making money came amiss to him. He even collected
+what was known as "watch rates" for the parish of St. Anne's, and might
+have been seen going about with an ink-bottle in his buttonhole.
+
+Often the desires of our heart tarry long in coming to us. This was
+among the times of hardest work and trial in all Flaxman's life, and he
+came out of it well. At the end of the five years the needed money was
+collected!
+
+And now, while the great event of his life was drawing near, his boyhood
+had left him, and he was entering on the work of the man. Already he had
+gained some fame in London. The newspapers took notice of his going.
+
+"We understand that Flaxman the sculptor is about to leave his modest
+mansion in Wardour Street for Rome."
+
+And now a very feast of delight awaited him. With his arrival in Rome,
+what wonders opened to his view, what grandeur and sublimity in the
+examples of ancient art! What skill and magnificence and luxuriance he
+saw in the churches, what wealth of creation on their walls and windows
+and cupolas, what sculpture, what painting! It was as if an enchanted
+world had suddenly spread itself out before his eyes.
+
+Gradually it came to be known that Flaxman had arrived, and there
+gathered about him men of taste and culture--rich men many of them--men
+of position. But the great sculptor's ways were just the simple ones of
+old. He was not easily affected by the great of the world. He was
+always his manly simple self to rich and poor alike. He adopted no more
+luxurious ways of living with his days of prosperity. He prized money
+little, just as a something in exchange for which he could get food and
+clothing, or with which he might help the poor and suffering. The fine
+character of the boy seemed to have expanded into fuller beauty in the
+man.
+
+After his stay in Rome he returned to London, his spirit, one could
+imagine, bathed in a very inspiration from all he had seen and heard. He
+came back to his native land with a name made, and quietly set about
+getting a house, a studio, assistants, workmen, models.
+
+He executed a statue of Lord Mansfield, for which he was paid L2,500.
+Prices were indeed altered from the old days, in which he counted
+himself well paid with ten shillings for the model of a goddess!
+
+"This little man cuts us all out," said one generous sculptor to
+another, willing to acknowledge Flaxman's great superiority. Honours now
+flowed in upon him. He was made an Associate of the Royal Academy. He
+was given the Professorship of the Chair of Sculpture. At his first
+lecture he was enthusiastically cheered. He had climbed to the highest
+height of his art. It almost seemed as if no honour remained to be
+bestowed. He was surrounded by fame and applause, but he was in no wise
+uplifted. So the years went on in the delight of the work he loved.
+
+But, unexpectedly and all unknown to his friends, his life was drawing
+to a close. In the winter of 1826 he caught a cold, seeming for a time
+to be slightly, though not seriously, ailing. In the beginning of
+December he grew much worse, but he would not go to bed.
+
+"When I lie I cannot breathe," he said. So, sitting up to the end, and
+with scarce a struggle, he passed away on the 7th of December.
+
+They buried him quietly in the churchyard of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.
+There was no great publicity, no large concourse of people. Just a few
+friends, a few artists--the greatest--were there, men who in tremulous,
+hushed voices said to each other they "had lost something greater and
+dearer than they should see again."
+
+Turning from the ending of his life, we cannot but feel that we are
+turning from the record of a man who has lived it well.
+
+An enthusiastic admirer has said, "He was a remarkable mixture of
+simplicity and genius--were you to try any other ingredients you would
+scarcely form so glorious a creature." And we hardly think he was far
+wrong.
+
+We can see very clearly the fine simplicity of his nature in his
+treatment of his workmen. They were to him rather friends than servants.
+They in their turn repaid him with a warm and devoted affection, calling
+him "the best master God ever made."
+
+To the end, as well in time of difficulty and of toil as in time of
+triumph, the man retained very much those qualities that had drawn out
+people's love for him in boyhood, the kindly word from the customer in
+the shop behind the counter. The world offered him of its best, as it
+has a way of doing to those who do well for themselves, but it had
+no power to draw him from his work and the simplicity of his simple
+home-life. It was only and always to that which is highest and best that
+he gave of his genius. That noble mind of his could stoop to nothing
+less. In churches all over England are to be found beautiful creations
+of his. In him were at once goodness and genius linked together.
+
+"If ever purity visited this earth," someone has said, "it remained with
+Flaxman."
+
+
+
+
+SIR HUMPHREY DAVY.
+
+
+Amid the wild beautiful scenery of Cornwall, where the waters of the
+Atlantic wash our English shores, was born in the winter of 1778 the
+greatest chemist England has ever seen. We read in our childish
+geography books that for being the birthplace of Humphrey Davy the town
+of Penzance has for long been famous, for the coming into the world of
+that man whose name is perhaps best known for the invention of the
+Miners' Safety Lamp, that has lit the darkness of our coal mines and
+saved hundreds of human lives.
+
+Humphrey was the son of a wood-carver, a man not high up in the world,
+but we find him free enough from the straits of poverty that have often
+been the cradle of genius, though, indeed, a cradle out of which genius
+has had a way of growing to sturdy stalwart manhood. The child from the
+outset entered on life with eagerness and enthusiasm, seeming to take
+a firm, earnest grip, as it were, even from babyhood. It was this same
+vigour of mind that spurred him on all through--in boyhood and manhood
+alike--that made him face difficulty with such a brave, dauntless
+spirit, and overcome obstacles with never a thought of letting them
+overcome him.
+
+He was quick, energetic, and alert, even as a child. When hardly more
+than five years old his mother often noticed him with baby fingers
+rapidly turning the pages of some book as if he were counting their
+number or glancing at the pictures. To her no small astonishment on
+questioning him, she found the lisping baby lips could repeat the story.
+It was the same through life. Long years after, when he was a great
+chemist, making wonderful experiments in his laboratory, he had no
+patience with slowness. He would keep several experiments going at
+the same time, attending first to one, then to another. If the exact
+instrument he wanted were not at hand, he would recklessly break or
+alter another to suit his purpose. His impetuous spirit could never
+brook delay. With him quickness meant power, and while quick he was also
+sure.
+
+As a child he specially loved the _Pilgrim's Progress_. The charm of its
+word-pictures, its characters fired his quick imagination. And history
+too, especially the history of his own country. These two, it may be,
+inspired him very early to a love of romance and story, and among the
+boys at school in Penzance he was not slow to gain the reputation of
+story-teller. Some were tales of fun, others tales of thrilling wonder
+and terror, but all flowed easily from the boy's lips and held his
+listeners enthralled.
+
+When he was no more than eight years old he would take his stand on a
+cart in the middle of the market-place, his boyish figure drawn to its
+full height, and there harangue the boys who gathered in little groups
+to hear the young orator. At school there was nothing in any way
+remarkable about young Humphrey, except, perhaps, that somewhere hid
+away within him was the gift of rhyme or the gift of poetry. English
+and Latin verse alike came easy to him, and by-and-by his schoolfellows
+found out his facility, and they pressed him into their service to
+compose valentines and love-letters. But except for this he seemed in
+these early years to be nothing more than a happy, healthy English boy,
+full of fun and spirits. He would fish off Penzance Pier for grey
+mullet, catching more than his companions. He would bait his hooks and
+wait till a shoal of these difficult fish were swimming about the bait,
+then by a clever jerk of his tackle entangle and capture them. His love
+of fishing remained with him all through life--almost to the end. So
+strong was it that even as a man he never could conceal his annoyance
+if unsuccessful, or if he discovered a friend to have caught a larger
+number than he. So keen and ardent was he that he would dress himself in
+green that the wily fish might know no difference between him and the
+green trees and grassy banks!
+
+In his boyhood we find it difficult to trace any germs of that talent
+for experimenting and inventing that distinguished him in later life.
+He scooped turnips hollow, and lighted up the insides with candles--but
+what boy has not experimented in the same way? He made squibs, or
+"thunder-powder," that exploded on a stone with a loud report that
+delighted his companions. But there is no trace of an unusual bent of
+mind here--just an example of an ardent, eager English boy, full of life
+and spirits.
+
+In 1793 he went to school in Truro, not far from Penzance. He was quick,
+but that was all--a clever boy, not a prodigy. His master, writing long
+years after, when the boy's name had become a household word in England,
+said:--
+
+"I did not at that time discover any extraordinary abilities."
+
+It must have been a school of the old sort that Mr. Davy had lighted
+upon for his son, for the story goes that young Humphrey, at times in
+scrapes like other boys, while punishment hung over him, had these
+doggrel lines fired off by his master at his head--
+
+    "Now, Master Davy,
+    Now, sir, I have 'e,
+    No one shall save 'e;
+    Good Master Davy."
+
+And with the end of the rhyme down came the flat ruler on the open palm
+of the culprit! School, while it may not have done him a great deal of
+good, at least did not do him much harm. His own frank, buoyant mind
+prevented his being twisted into a cut-and-dried shape, or pressed into
+any special mould. Long years after he gave thanks that in those young
+days he was left very much to his own bent.
+
+"What I am I have made myself," he said. "I say this without vanity, and
+in pure simplicity of heart."
+
+So passed the long, sunshiny days of school-time, and when he was
+sixteen he left school finally. After that, for one short, blissful year
+he shot and fished and lived chiefly in the open, surrounded by the
+beauties of Cornish scenery, for which in after years his heart always
+kept a tender memory, when the bustle and din of a city, and the whirl
+of city life, had well-nigh drowned for him Nature's softer tones. He
+grew then to know familiarly bird and beast, and rock and flower. In
+after years, when his life was more fully filled than most men's, a
+chance word or reference would seem to waft him a whiff of the sea off
+the Cornish shore, and a great longing would seize him for the loved
+scenes of his childhood. Then, in the midst of his work, he would take a
+hurried run home. During this year of holiday, which he enjoyed with the
+whole-heartedness of a careless, happy boy, he collected a number of
+birds, and stuffed them with his own hands--and with not a little skill.
+
+Almost to the end of life he kept his love of shooting. As in fishing
+he tried to efface himself and deceive the wily fish, so in shooting
+he was strangely beset by fear of an accident, and he would study to
+make himself as conspicuous as possible in a scarlet hat! Almost at
+the end, when his strength was failing, it is pathetic enough to find
+him ask to be driven to the field, that he might still fire a shot.
+
+But already over his young life there brooded its first great shadow.
+In 1794 his father died. It may have been this which helped to change
+young Humphrey from the happy, careless boy to something more serious,
+more thoughtful, that fixed his mind on the responsibilities life was
+so full of, that helped to turn it from mere sport and pleasure to the
+improvement of his mind--to the gaining of knowledge. At any rate, about
+this time the boy laid hold of life, and, as a rower in a boat-race
+might do, steadied down to his responsibilities.
+
+His mother apprenticed him to a surgeon and apothecary in Penzance, and
+straightway with that ardour and enthusiasm that carried him through so
+much of his great work in later life, he fell in love with chemistry. He
+tried boyish experiments. He used the rudest instruments--anything that
+he could lay hands on. Pots, pans, vessels in the surgery--nothing was
+safe or sacred from his touch. He filled the house with strange and
+hideous odours--he burnt holes in his sister's dresses. When he turned
+the garret into a laboratory his good old guardian would exclaim--
+
+"This boy Humphrey is incorrigible! Was there ever so idle a dog? He
+will blow us all into the air."
+
+Half an hour later he would proudly and fondly call the boy
+"Philosopher," or "Sir Humphrey," as if already his prophetic eye
+pierced the future and beheld his greatness.
+
+So he spent much of the day, and in the long summer evenings he would
+ramble along the seashore as far as Marazion armed with a hammer with
+which to chip off "specimens" from the rocks, for already geology had
+thrown over him its peculiar spell. He would end these happy days with
+tea at a favourite aunt's. And it was not merely boyish enjoyment these
+solitary rambles brought. They and the still small voice of Nature
+were telling on him. Gradually they were making and moulding the boy,
+approaching now as he was, very near to the threshold of manhood.
+
+Even then, however, he was trying to improve himself. With the roar of
+the waves and the howl of the winds in his ears in these lonely walks,
+he would declaim to the elements, in the hope of softening a defect in
+his voice. This probably arose from his having what is called "no ear."
+He had no notion of either time or tune. It used to trouble him much
+that he never could keep step in the Volunteer Infantry corps to which
+he belonged, and someone tried to teach him "God Save the King," but
+without success.
+
+The surgical part of his profession was always disagreeable and
+distasteful to the boy, although from no want of courage on his part.
+The story goes that one day about this time he was bitten in the leg by
+a dog supposed to be mad. No sooner did he realise what had happened to
+him than he there and then took a knife and cut the piece right out of
+his leg, and then went to the surgery and had the wound cauterised.
+
+His mind was such that it instinctively rose to emergencies and grappled
+with anything--a big thing or a little thing. Both were to him alike.
+Knowledge was what he wanted. He wanted to know as much as possible, and
+he liked to get to the bottom of a difficulty for himself. Into each
+new thing that came his way he threw himself with all the ardour and
+impetuosity of his nature. Nor was he merely practical and nothing more.
+He had that sympathy and delicacy of mind that revelled in communing
+with nature. This expressed itself in sonnets and poems--some of which
+he wrote when he was only twelve. A great poetic genius once said of
+him--
+
+"If Davy had not been the first chemist he would have been the first
+poet of his age."
+
+But poetry was not the field in which he was to shine. His genius was
+for experiments. He went on eagerly experimenting on anything--heat,
+light, air. Anything connected with chemistry drew him as with a magnet.
+The first time some real experimenting apparatus found its way to his
+hands he could not conceal his delight. Specially did an air-pump charm
+him. It was to him as a new and fascinating toy to a child. He kept
+working the piston up and down, and would hardly let it go!
+
+And now it seemed as if it were almost time for him to try his wings
+in the larger air of the great world. More than one man had come to
+Penzance who perhaps gave the boy a foretaste of the delights he was to
+know by-and-by as a man in the atmosphere of culture and talent in
+which his lot was to be cast. Among these were Josiah Wedgwood, the
+Staffordshire Potter, and young Watt, the son of the inventor of the
+Condensing Steam Engine.
+
+There was about young Humphrey's outward appearance about this time
+nothing specially attractive. He had round shoulders, not a comely face,
+and a manner that was in no way remarkable or engaging, but surely the
+light of genius must have shone from his eyes!
+
+However, such as he was outwardly, he now prepared to launch away into
+the great world. A professor of chemistry in Bristol had heard of his
+experiments in light and heat, and proposed to him that he should become
+assistant in the Pneumatic Institution there. There was not much money
+to be earned by it.
+
+"He must be maintained, but the fund will not furnish a salary from
+which a man can lay up anything." So they told him. But was it not his
+most direct road to fortune?
+
+Perhaps Humphrey thought so. At any rate, the Penzance surgeon was
+prevailed upon to cut short the term of the boy's apprenticeship, "on
+account of the singularly promising talents Mr. Davy had displayed."
+
+So Humphrey went out from his native town, and from his home, as many a
+young man had gone before him, with a heart beating high with hope, and,
+as his young, ardent spirit believed, the world spread out before him.
+
+And certainly a brilliant future was opening to the boy. He turned his
+steps to Bristol, throwing himself in his own characteristic way into
+his new work.
+
+He made experiments on air and gases, some of these daring and dangerous
+enough, and entailing not a little personal risk. But while these things
+lay nearest to his heart, he had eye and ear both open for all that was
+going forward in his new life. He was so many-sided himself, it was as
+if he could not come in contact with anyone without catching some spark
+of interest from him--the philosopher, the poet, the physician, the
+sportsman. He had something in common with all.
+
+He entered into his work as if body and mind knew no fatigue. If an idea
+came into his head he could not rest until he had worked it out. If he
+broke down in health, he simply started afresh when he had recovered.
+
+In his spare time he wrote books and pamphlets on chemistry, so that in
+writing and experimenting his name came to be known to the scientific
+men of the day. And now it seemed as if one step in fame followed
+another. Success was crowned by success.
+
+He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Chemistry to the Royal
+Institution in 1801. He had now entered on manhood, and was launched
+on the great world of London, having all the ability to carry himself
+through. He may have been handicapped with slight flaws of manner. If he
+appeared over-confident, it probably was that in reality he was shy and
+timid, and attempted to cover these little awkwardnesses. His friends
+grieved in secret over the noticeable change, fearing lest with
+simplicity of manner he might throw over simplicity of character. But
+no man is, after all, perfect, and in spite of this, Davy was rapidly
+mounting the ladder of success.
+
+The young chemist soon discovered that his lectures drew crowds,
+even created a great and extraordinary sensation. In imagination we
+can picture the lecture-room, the crowded audience--all sorts and
+conditions, from lovers of science, ladies of fashion, men of rank, to
+the threadbare-coated student--eagerly watching the experiments, and all
+drinking in his words as the young lecturer, fired with his subject,
+animated with all the charm of which he was so complete a master the dry
+bones of geology with life and breath, or again brought the study of
+chemistry, hitherto unget-at-able and out of reach, down to their
+level. The audience hung on his lips spellbound.
+
+The young popular lecturer was caressed and made much of.
+
+"Davy, covered with glory," writes a friend at this time, "dines with me
+to-day."
+
+Soon they made him Professor of Chemistry to the Institution. Promotion
+followed promotion, but each year was a spur to greater exertion. Time
+would fail to enumerate the steps in his triumphs. A continuous sun
+seemed to shine upon him. And his strength seemed equal to all demands.
+Money had never been of much account to him. Now, indeed, he might have
+had it in abundance had he chosen, by helping forward manufactures with
+his scientific knowledge, but that was not his aim. His ambition was
+scientific glory.
+
+"To be useful to science and mankind was the pursuit in which he
+gloried."
+
+The years that followed were years full of hard work. In 1812 he was
+knighted. It seemed as if almost everything he touched were like a gold
+mine which yielded some new treasure to him.
+
+"Science," he said once to a young man anxious to pursue it, "is a harsh
+mistress, and repays one poorly." But for him she surely rather had
+"full measure pressed down and running over."
+
+And now, when he was about thirty-seven, his thoughts were first turned
+to the great triumph of his life, the invention that was to make his
+name famous.
+
+There was in England, especially in the north and midland counties, a
+great and crying evil--the danger in which our miners and their families
+lived, as these brave men daily and hourly carried their lives in their
+hands. Constantly the newspapers were filled with terrible accounts of
+accidents in our coal-pits--mines exploding, men and boys and horses
+being blown to pieces or buried alive--and always from the same
+cause--the want of a safety lamp. A great quantity of gas got cooped up,
+in spite of contrivances for leading pure air into the murky passages of
+the mines, and these gases, directly they came in contact with a naked
+flame, exploded. There had been old days in which men worked by a feeble
+light borrowed from the phosphorescence of decaying fish-skins or "steel
+mills," which gave out fitful gleams or sparks when a piece of flint
+was struck against them; but these days had passed, and accidents
+multiplied. And though men were startled and shocked when they read of
+them, still the wholesale slaughter went on. The gas exploded, bursting
+up everything near, killing the miners, erupting great masses of coal
+and dust and mangled men and horses. And not only this, but it blew down
+the trap-doors, leaving men to die of "after-damp," the more horrible
+death of suffocation, because lingering and slow.
+
+To remedy this crying evil Davy bent the whole force of his brilliant
+intellect, and after much thought invented the Safety Lamp. He
+surrounded the flame of his lamp with wire gauze. The gas entered and
+exploded within it, but the explosion did not pass outward.
+
+It was the most glorious triumph of his genius. In 1816 it was adopted.
+With his "Davy" in his hand there was now no fear for the miner.
+
+"The highest ambition of my life," he wrote, "has been to deserve the
+name of a friend to humanity."
+
+He took out no patent. He wanted no money for it. It was reward enough
+for him to see it work.
+
+"If you had patented it," said a friend to him one day, "you might have
+been drawing your five or ten thousand a year."
+
+"No, my good friend," was his reply, "I never thought of such a thing.
+My sole object was to serve the cause of humanity. It might undoubtedly
+enable me to put four horses in my carriage, but what would it avail me
+to have it said that Sir Humphrey drives his carriage-and-four?"
+
+"I value it," he said again, "more than anything I ever did."
+
+And now the world's honours waited upon him. In 1818 Government made him
+Baronet. In 1820 he was made President of the Royal Society.
+
+But already in the zenith of his triumph, there were small signs that
+showed too surely that he was failing. In 1826 he retired from the
+Presidentship, and later in the year he was attacked by apoplexy,
+followed by paralysis.
+
+"Here I am," he wrote pathetically from Rome, "a ruin among ruins."
+
+And so he began to look death in the face.
+
+"I do not wish to live so far as I am personally concerned," he said,
+"but I have views which I could develop--if it please God to save my
+life--which would be useful to science and mankind."
+
+Never again, however, was he to return to England. In Rome he had a
+second seizure. He had a great longing to reach Geneva, and a few hours
+after he arrived, although he appeared at first to rally, he took ill,
+and there passed away quietly and peacefully, not merely, as someone has
+it, "one of the greatest, but one of the most benevolent and amiable of
+men."
+
+They buried him in the little burying-ground at Geneva, the long
+procession wending its way to his last resting-place on foot. His widow
+erected a tablet to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
+
+He was the greatest chemist of the age; but after all, his best memorial
+will abide in the memory of his fellow-men as the inventor of the Safety
+Lamp.
+
+To himself his invention brought no small happiness.
+
+"I was never more affected," he said on one occasion, "than by a written
+address I received from the working colliers, when I was in the north,
+thanking me, on behalf of themselves and their families, for the
+preservation of their lives."
+
+His, indeed, is a career of striking brilliancy. He is like some
+mountain climber who climbs ever upwards. And we, looking up, seem to
+see him leap from one dazzling peak to another. Honours and attainments
+were his such as come to few men in this world, but we cannot but feel
+that what gave him the greatest joy in life was that he had been enabled
+to rescue hundreds of lives, to bring light out of darkness, and cheer
+and safety where before there had been uncertainty and death. It is for
+this that the name of Humphrey Davy will be blessed by men and women in
+the ages still to come.
+
+
+
+
+SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.
+
+
+Perhaps no man has risen out of lower depths of poverty and ignorance
+and obscurity to the very top of fame's ladder than Richard Arkwright.
+More than 150 years ago, towards the end of December, 1732, there was
+born in a house in a humble side street of Preston, a child who was to
+leave his stamp, not only on his native town, but on the whole of
+England, and indeed on the civilisation of the world.
+
+The son of poor parents, and, like Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of
+thirteen, it may be that that Christmas held even less brightness than
+usual for the struggling Arkwrights because of the coming of an extra
+mouth to feed. At any rate, if ever child were confronted by the chill
+and dreary outlook on a cold world, that child was the baby Richard.
+
+Preston was not, 150 years ago, the Preston of to-day. Then it was
+a town with a few thousand inhabitants, "beyond the trading part of
+the county," while to-day it is in the very centre of the cotton
+manufacture, hiving with crowds of human beings--a great town because
+here, in a squalid, insignificant by-street, one bleak December day,
+there first saw the light the man who was to "give to England the power
+of cotton."
+
+As there was scant enough money for food and clothing in the Arkwright
+house, so it followed that for schooling there was none at all. Young
+Richard would have stood a poor chance had it not been that his uncle
+Richard took pity on the boy growing up in a state of neglect and
+ignorance, and taught him to read. In later days he added something to
+this small beginning by attending classes in the winter evenings. And so
+the early years of his life passed, and in time the boy went out into
+the world, poorly and scantily enough armed for its difficult battle.
+Long years after he bemoaned his ignorance and want of education when he
+felt all the drawbacks, the trammelling, the holding-down of it, when he
+realised how it handicapped him in the race of life. And when he was an
+old man over fifty, after pressing into the day as many as sixteen
+working hours, he would steal an hour from sleep to learn English
+grammar and another hour to practise writing and spelling.
+
+But, poorly equipped as young Richard was in most ways, he went out into
+life provided with a great brain, and had he known it, that brain was to
+open to him a door through which--could he have looked then--he might
+have seen stretching away into the years a long vista of triumphs and
+successes. The boy began on a very low round of the ladder--a strange
+enough beginning for the future maker of the cotton world: he entered
+on his career as apprentice to a barber. But, boy as he was, he threw
+himself with energy and ardour--these two qualities that made him a
+great man later on--into the new business. He took a firm hold of it. He
+worked steadily at it for years, having most likely nothing in his mind
+higher than the setting up for himself--the becoming some day a master
+barber! It was this goal at that time that seemed to him getting on in
+life.
+
+So his boyhood sped away, and when his apprenticeship had come to an end
+he took the great and important step of setting up for himself. He left
+Preston and went to Bolton. Poor indeed must have been his stock of
+money at this point in his fortunes. It was no imposing shop he took,
+with windows and painted sign, but the smallest and poorest place to be
+had. He rented an underground cellar, but his eager spirit was to be
+damped neither by poverty nor a dreary outlook. He bent all his powers
+on getting customers, and as the first step to this he stuck out a
+placard above his cellar door with the scrawled invitation--
+
+    "_Come to the subterraneous barber, he shaves for a penny._"
+
+In the little world of hair-dressing the rude appeal made a small
+sensation. Here, as in other businesses, there was competition.
+Arkwright shaved for a penny. At this rate the subterraneous barber
+would draw away the customers of others! While the underground cellar
+would be crowded, their shops would be empty. And so they were forced to
+let down their prices, and others besides Arkwright shaved for a penny.
+
+Young Richard, rising one morning, grasped the fact that he was now not
+alone in his prices. Others were running him dangerously close. He was
+merely one of many now, but with the enterprise that outdid others
+by-and-by in the great world of mechanical invention he resolved to
+strike out a bold new line. The old placard was taken down and another
+printed and set up in its stead.
+
+    "_A clean shave for a halfpenny!_"
+
+But Arkwright was not content to stand still in shaving people's chins
+or in anything else. These were the days of wearing wigs, and it struck
+him that something was to be made out of wigs, or perukes, as they were
+called, and so he gave up his business of shaving in a measure and began
+to travel about the country buying and selling human hair. He regularly
+attended country fairs and bought the locks and tresses of the young
+girls who came there to be hired out to service. In time he grew to
+make successful bargains with these, and to add to this he discovered a
+chemical dye, with which he dyed the hair and sold it to wig-makers, and
+by-and-by "Arkwright's Hair" came to be known as the best in the market.
+
+It most likely was--at any rate, it may have been in those
+journeys--going in and out among the houses and cottages in the country
+that he came to be familiar with the sound of the "weaver's shuttle"
+and the turning of the "one-thread machine." Long years after he was
+to find that familiarity stand him in good stead. But, successful and
+hard-working as he was, life was still a struggle, and with all his
+efforts he earned but a bare living. It was hard to wrest a fortune from
+wig-making and chin-shaving, so gradually there grew up in his busy
+brain a project. It formed very slowly, but it did grow. It was the
+genius within him struggling with disadvantages and drawbacks that would
+have "posed" most men. His mind, leaning strongly to the mechanical,
+groped vaguely at first after something, and then gradually it settled
+down to the "spinning machine," and from that time onwards all his
+energies were bent on that.
+
+In his journeys among the cottagers it had been easy enough to see that
+the yarn could not be made quickly enough for the weaver, that though in
+thousands of cottages the "one-thread machine" turned from morning till
+night and again from night till morning, it could not keep pace with the
+shuttle. What was wanted was a dozen, fifty, a hundred threads to be
+made by a single pair of hands. Did he perhaps see dimly even then that
+he was to be the man who should throw out the old-fashioned hand-wheel?
+
+One day he noticed a red-hot bar of iron become elongated as it passed
+between two iron rollers. In that instant he first saw dimly the
+tiny seedling that was to grow one day to the mighty tree of the
+spinning-frame. The idea lodged in his brain and took firm hold of him.
+
+In outward appearance at this time Arkwright was in no way specially
+attractive or remarkable, but genius is not always outwardly beautiful,
+and "there were notions in that rough head of his" that were one day to
+alter England.
+
+But Arkwright was no practical mechanic, and so he called in help
+from outside--from one Kay, a clockmaker in Warrington, and under his
+directions Kay made rollers and wheels, and shortly Arkwright had his
+models ready to hand. Meantime, while his heart beat high with hope and
+exultation, his pet models being always in his mind though for bread and
+butter he still made wigs and shaved chins, he received a sudden and
+unexpected check. His wife--for he was already married--chafing in
+secret over what she considered his fantastic imaginings and idle
+dreamings, made up her mind to destroy that which distracted his mind
+from the business of shaving and money-making. As the surest means to
+her end she burned his models one day when he was out of the way. Poor
+Arkwright returned and discovered the mischief. In an instant his whole
+stubborn nature was up in arms. Indeed, so wrathful was he that he
+would from that day have nothing more to do with his wife, and the two
+separated.
+
+And now the great question was--how best to push the new model Kay had
+made. Poverty handicapped him sadly. It was impossible to push anything
+without money. He cast about in his mind where the money was to come
+from, and settled on an old friend in Preston, "a liquor merchant and
+painter" (probably a house-painter). To Preston he took his way. The
+friend consented to help him, and together with high hopes and great
+rejoicing he and Kay set up their model. But their secrecy had roused
+suspicion. Behind this friend's house there happened to be a closed-in
+garden with a number of gooseberry bushes. Close by in a neighbouring
+cottage lived two old ladies. At nights they declared they heard a
+strange humming noise among the bushes, as if the devil himself were
+making music, tuning up his bagpipes for Arkwright and Kay to dance a
+reel! The story got abroad. The people of Preston, excited and curious,
+were eager to break into the house and discover if Arkwright and Kay
+were indeed in league with the Evil One.
+
+But after the model had been set up and was about to be shown in the
+Free Grammar School in Preston, there came a sudden memory of dark
+stories still fresh in men's minds of how other inventors had been
+treated in Preston--how they had been mobbed and furiously ill-used,
+while their inventions had been smashed to atoms by a people
+panic-stricken because of their dread of machinery, which they believed
+would throw them out of work and take the bread out of their and their
+children's mouths. Arkwright remembered all this, and he and Kay finally
+made up their minds to pack up their models and set off for Nottingham.
+
+While Arkwright had been at Preston engrossed with thoughts of his model
+a political election took place, and he was called upon to vote. But
+so poor and so wretchedly clad was the man who was by-and-by to be a
+knight--the man who was to leave behind him half a million--that before
+he could present himself at the poll, several people had to club
+together to exchange the tattered garments for something that would at
+least be presentable!
+
+Arrived at Nottingham, Arkwright tried to get someone to help him with
+money. This brave man had firm faith in his invention and firm faith in
+himself. It was simply impossible to discourage him. But the time of
+waiting was long and weary before he fell in with a Mr. Strutt, the
+inventor of the stocking-frame. An inventor himself, perhaps he was the
+man who could best understand and appreciate Arkwright's invention. The
+two entered into partnership, and it may have seemed to Arkwright that
+his time of trial and waiting had at last come to an end.
+
+And now truly enough he had his foot firmly planted on the ladder of
+success. Behind him was a hard and toilsome boyhood. Before him were
+still long waiting, difficulties to face, men's opposition to overcome,
+dislike, distrust, envy, and jealousy to live down and conquer. But the
+first step had been taken, and never once along the difficult way do we
+find him flinch.
+
+In 1769, the same year in which James Watt patented his Condensing
+Steam Engine, Arkwright at the age of thirty-seven took out the patent
+for his Spinning-Frame. His next step was to erect a cotton mill at
+Chorley, and following that, one at Cromford, in Derbyshire. No sooner
+were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from
+all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock
+of the country.
+
+But Arkwright's brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings
+and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who
+said this invention was not all his. He had taken other men's thoughts
+and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his
+own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings,
+struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone
+down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of
+weary waiting, an expenditure of L12,000, and yet no profit from his
+invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide
+their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of
+hundreds. A strong force of police, and even of the military, was called
+out to quell the rioters. Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned,
+and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they
+could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by
+water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake.
+And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes,
+looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of
+their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who
+regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. They were doubtless at the
+same time looking to their pockets. If working men were thrown out of
+work, it meant that _they_ would have larger poor rates to pay, and so
+they too fell upon Arkwright, not seeing that here was the man ready and
+anxious, if they would but listen to him, to give thousands of people
+work where now instead only hundreds had it.
+
+Meantime he faced his opponents, showing always a brave front, and
+trying to defend himself at every point. He endured the spoiling of his
+property, and then, not content with browbeating him, they seized upon
+his patent rights and disputed them. And the upshot was that Arkwright's
+patent was set aside by Parliament. But even then the great inventor was
+not overwhelmed. Passing by the hotel where some of his enemies were
+standing after his defeat, he overheard one say to another--
+
+"Well, we have done for the old shaver at last." Arkwright turned round,
+ready, cool, immovable.
+
+"Never mind," he said, "I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave
+you all yet."
+
+He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying
+water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated
+on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was
+wanted.
+
+Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England.
+People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first
+now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and
+by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by
+his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each
+part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or
+that--a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle--one of these may have
+belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all
+together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole
+series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much
+as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins--a hard
+and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the
+other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too,
+was the strong mind that trained men and boys--never before used to
+machinery--to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking
+them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to
+system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the
+stupidity of workmen had sometimes almost daunted him, but these days
+were past.
+
+And how the man worked!--with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy
+over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his
+"penny a shave," striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches
+from his machines--and even more from his mills--flowed in upon him. He
+was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name
+of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land.
+King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff
+of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending
+his mills and his machinery--leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done
+when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even
+grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four
+horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an
+underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of
+note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without
+sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim
+to bodily suffering--subject to severe asthma--and how bravely and
+uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now,
+already early--while he was but in his sixtieth year--he began to fail.
+Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain
+and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the
+great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed
+away on the 3rd August, 1792.
+
+Arkwright's name was now of world-wide fame. Hundreds and thousands of
+people, many of whom had come to see his first cotton-mill, crowded the
+rocks and roads about Cromford, and mingled with the long procession
+that bore the body of the great inventor to his last resting-place.
+
+They erected a monument in the church of Cromford to his memory. But the
+name of Arkwright needs no carved memorial of stone. His memorial is of
+a more lasting kind, for it is he whom England has to thank to-day for
+an industry that has enriched the land. Not "proud Preston" alone--a
+small town at his birth, a mighty place of manufacture now--has
+Arkwright made to grow and flourish.
+
+He was a man of "Napoleon nerve." Where other men saw but a short way
+ahead, he grasped the end from the beginning; where other minds saw
+merely a part, his eye was able to take in the whole. He may have
+gathered up some threads from other men's brains, but it was he who wove
+them into one great whole. He had a business faculty--he had shown it as
+a boy--that rose almost to the height of genius. And he believed in
+himself. He had great notions, great ambitions. Nothing was too big a
+project for him to attempt. And success was his--great success, as the
+world counts it. Immense riches, too, were his, for when he died he left
+behind him half a million. But to us that seems not of so much account
+as that that great mind of his was the first to grasp what was to put
+within their reach a source of riches and profit to thousands of
+working-people in England, and this in face of bitter opposition from
+the people themselves. He braved their jealousy, he held his own against
+their prejudices and attacks, and working often in bodily weakness and
+pain, but with persevering determination, he brought this boon to his
+country. With untiring courage and long, patient labour, he built up the
+splendid scheme that has turned out for us to be the Factory System of
+our country to-day.
+
+
+
+
+JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
+
+
+When Josiah Wedgwood was born, some 170 years ago, I daresay the people
+of the little village of Burslem would have been greatly astonished had
+they been told that the humble potter's child was by-and-by to change
+the place, with its few straggling houses, into a flourishing town with
+thousands of inhabitants. And not this alone, but that he would make for
+himself such fame that his name should be a household word throughout
+Great Britain, and indeed throughout the world.
+
+When Josiah came into the world there was already a small army of
+brothers and sisters awaiting him in the humble little house close by
+the churchyard of Burslem, for he was the youngest of thirteen.
+
+Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with
+the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were
+shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great
+world. In this way the midland counties of England were a long time
+emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county
+of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were
+straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or
+mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways.
+Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay
+had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and
+collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water.
+
+Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened
+his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had
+been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and
+butter-dishes and porringers--for spoons and plates were still of
+wood--out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and
+polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn
+things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy.
+
+A potter's work could be divided among one family. The father and sons
+made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strapped them on
+the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched
+that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts,
+while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their
+lips, urged them on with whip and lash.
+
+It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born
+with a boy's best blessing--a good mother--a woman who had a heart large
+enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down
+to them by example a birthright better than riches--to make them
+patient, industrious, dependent on self.
+
+When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with
+uncertain step, he was sent to a dame's school, quite as much to be out
+of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door
+of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse's back,
+hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he
+was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three
+and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the
+walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature's
+beauties--her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances--as we best can
+know things, by close and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when
+he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten
+faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and
+Burslem that rose before his mind's eye as he decorated his china
+services with coloured leaves and flowers.
+
+When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left
+to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she
+failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed
+before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his
+hard-won earnings to leave to his children much--L20 when they reached
+the age of twenty-one.
+
+"And so," as Josiah used to say long afterwards, "I began on the very
+lowest round of the ladder."
+
+And now the child's scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write
+and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic,
+but for the rest--that great storehouse of knowledge the world
+contained--he had to unlock the door of _that_ for himself, and he did
+it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years
+went on.
+
+To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it
+fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of
+course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post
+of turning what was called "the potter's wheel."
+
+This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved
+horizontally and beside which sat a man called "a thrower," shaping with
+his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or
+whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.
+
+The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of
+"thrower," hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness
+with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud
+descended and settled on his life--a cloud that, though he struggled
+bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.
+
+The terrible epidemic of small-pox visited Burslem, and the Wedgwood
+family, living as they did on the edge of the churchyard, were among the
+first to take it, the youngest so badly that his life was despaired of.
+However, after long struggle, they pulled him through; but the disease
+left behind it a knee which gave him hours and days of excruciating
+pain, and seemed almost as if it would blight his whole life and ruin
+his career. Every remedy was tried, in vain. At first when he rose in
+bed, weak and unstrung, he fell back again. When later he began to stand
+it was with weariness and pain. But the dark cloud had, though all
+unseen at first, a silver lining. Out of what looked a great calamity
+there sprang good. The boy when he crawled back to work was no longer
+fit for the "thrower's" bench. The position he had now to take--with his
+leg stretched out in front of him--cramped and impeded him. No longer
+active and able-bodied, he was thrown, as it were, in upon himself, and
+so took to thinking--not in a gloomy, despondent way, but thinking how
+best he could improve himself, how best he could succeed in that calling
+that from the very outset held a charm for him and all through life lay
+very near to his heart.
+
+At the age of fourteen Josiah was formally bound apprentice to his
+brother. Here is the form. The quaint words sound ceremonious--almost
+solemn. The writing provided that he was--
+
+"To learn the Art, Mystery, Occupation or Imployment of throwing and
+handling which he, the said Thomas Wedgwood, now useth, and with him as
+an apprentice to dwell, continue and serve."
+
+An apprentice in those days at the pottery works was allowed "his meat,
+drink, washing and lodging, with suitable apparel of all kinds, both
+linen and woollen and all other necessaries, both in sickness and in
+health."
+
+In return the master "was to teach or cause to be taught the art of
+throwing and handling."
+
+How poor these potters were, and how poorly they paid their apprentices,
+may be gathered from this:
+
+For the first three years he got 1_s._ a week, for the second three
+years he got 1_s._ 6_d._ a week, and for the seventh and last 4_s._ a
+week. Besides this he got, once a year, a pair of shoes. At the end of
+his apprenticeship, if he chose, he got 5_s._ a week for five years. It
+was a dreary enough outlook for an eager, ambitious boy anxious to make
+his way in the world.
+
+But boy though he was, the difficulty of getting on--pain,
+weakness--none of these obstacles were allowed to overcome Josiah.
+Then even at that early age he showed the germs of that perseverance
+that stood out so strongly by-and-by in the character of the man.
+
+Strange as it may seem to us, what sounds the very common business of
+making rough earthenware milk-bowls and butter-pots and plates was often
+half shrouded in mystery, and went near to being something of a secret.
+
+Pottery was yet in its beginnings--not yet an art--and it could only
+grow and come to perfection by someone giving to it deep thought and
+long, patient, painstaking experiments. For instance, one man might pore
+over the matter and discover something new or come to some conclusion.
+He might find one substance, a clay or a soil, that when mixed with a
+second substance produced a third thing--something new. He might begin
+to work this out in his pottery, and immediately all the workmen in the
+place knew the secret of how he did it. The knowledge spread, and while
+he believed it was still all his own, other men had seized on his
+discovery; other potteries were turning out his ware and selling it.
+
+So keen were men to find out the discoveries of other men, and so
+closely have these secrets been kept, that sometimes a master would
+prefer to employ idiots, when he could get them, to turn his wheel. If
+one workman appeared more skilled than the others he was shut up while
+at work. The door was locked, the windows were blinded, and when he came
+out he was carefully searched. Men have been known to pretend to be
+idiots just that they might get inside a noted pottery; even to put up
+with kicks and blows for their stupidity; to make intentional mistakes
+to encourage the falsehood; to hold on to this perhaps as long as two
+whole years; while night after night they crept home and there wrote
+down carefully every item of what they had seen, and so made the secrets
+their own.
+
+In Josiah's boyhood there was much of this sort of thing carried on. A
+strict secrecy--a protection of themselves--as merchant vessels on the
+high seas in olden days guarded themselves from the pirates who, ready
+to pounce upon them, roamed the waters.
+
+But as a man--a great, large-hearted, open-minded man--and one of the
+greatest inventors of his time, Wedgwood never followed this line of
+action. Rather was he nobly willing that others should be the better
+for his brains. And so during his long life he took out only one patent,
+as we call that which makes an invention all a man's own and prevents
+others touching it.
+
+At the time we write of there was just beginning to dawn on Josiah's
+boyish mind what was by-and-by to raise him to the very top of his
+calling.
+
+He took to pondering and considering and making experiments with the
+clay that lay about the doors. How to make the black mottled ware more
+delicate--the ruddy-coloured of a fairer hue--how to mould rough edges
+more smoothly--how to introduce fresh colours and glazes.
+
+The whole thing threw over the boy a great glamour of fascination. They
+show in Burslem yet a teapot--an ornamented thing made of the ochreous
+clay of the district--as "Josiah Wedgwood's first teapot."
+
+But the elder brother, brought up to the cut-and-dried routine of the
+potteries life, had little patience with what he looked on as the
+younger's shiftless dreamings. He had brothers and sisters to keep, and
+money to make, and if Josiah were not more practical he wanted him no
+longer.
+
+And so the honest but short-sighted brother, his eyes blinded by the
+present need of ready money, failed to realise that there was something
+greater, and that the young brother would one day leave him and his
+plodding ways far behind.
+
+But while his brother looked upon the boy as an unpractical dreamer,
+there were others in Burslem who saw the beauty of the patient,
+uncomplaining, steadfast life, and more than one father in the place
+called on his sons to take a pattern from Josiah Wedgwood.
+
+But in the midst of his patient inquiries, and while he was yet little
+more than a boy, a swift blow descended upon the Wedgwoods. The mother
+who had for so long been father and mother in one to them was taken from
+them. They laid her in the quiet little church of Burslem, and the
+brothers and sisters went on living together.
+
+It was not till he had reached the age of twenty-two that Josiah cut the
+knot that bound him to home and went out into the great world to seek
+his fortune, as eager youths will do to the end of time. He took with
+him his little all--his father's legacy of L20, a pair of capable
+hands, and a wonderful brain.
+
+His boyhood was over. Manhood lay before him--rough places at first in
+the world, puzzles, difficulties, trials, but in the end name, fame,
+riches. If we could follow him past boyhood and just peep at the
+future, I should like to tell you how he let some of these fancies
+his brother had despised have free play; how he invented a new green
+earthenware, forming plates in the shape of ornamental leaves; how he
+coloured snuff-boxes and toilet vessels to imitate precious stones, and
+how the London jewellers eagerly bought these up. How he made flowered
+cups and saucers, familiar enough to us to-day, but strange and
+beautiful to people then. Under him things took a step forward. People
+even at their meals saw things of beauty. These became an education to
+them--an art. Besides this they found other improvements. Lids fitted,
+spouts poured, handles could be held! These were small beginnings, but
+from these Josiah made great strides.
+
+And one of the secrets of these strides was that he bent his _whole
+mind_ upon his work. At night, after a day of hard work, he would
+sit down and write out every smallest detail of his experiments and
+discoveries. No pains were too great for him to take. Neither would he
+trust to memory, so often in pain and weariness, but with a perseverance
+that was never daunted, he would make his evening notes.
+
+To him no trouble seemed too great, no detail too small. The boyhood
+rarely fails to show the stuff the man is made of, and it was no
+ordinary stuff the great potter was made of. So we are not surprised
+that step by step he moved upwards and onwards. Hands and brain were
+never idle. Often prostrate with pain and weakness, he would still
+read and think and plan. Indeed, so much did he get into the habit of
+planning that many a night it robbed him of his sleep, for he never lay
+down at nights without making in his head a programme for the coming
+day.
+
+Another secret of his success was his courage. Was it long familiarity
+with pain--for his knee broke out again and again, and gave him weary
+hours of suffering--that taught him to endure and resolutely refuse
+to be overcome? Was it this made him say with Napoleon, "Nothing is
+impossible"?
+
+He met all difficulties alike with patience and with a steadfast purpose
+to overcome them. He had two special ones. His workmen--often lazy,
+indolent, drunken--were a trouble to him, as were also the furnaces,
+where the heat had to be of a certain degree to fire his ware, and where
+sometimes the work and labour of months would be destroyed in a few
+hours. By patience he won the hearts of the first, and they came to
+trust him, and by patience, too, he gradually righted the second. He
+pulled down and he built up till the kilns were right.
+
+"It must be done," he used to say of any difficult enterprise, "let what
+may stand in the way."
+
+He had great ambition for his beloved calling. He wanted to make it an
+art. England had been long famed for cheapness but not for beauty, and
+so he set himself to study the designs of the ancients and of the
+Greeks, copying them on china and porcelain.
+
+And yet it seemed that even as he took step after step there were ever
+on each round of the ladder new difficulties. There was a long-standing
+one--the wretched state of the roads in Staffordshire, and the
+difficulty of getting the ware carried to other places for sale, and
+of getting necessaries for the work brought into the county.
+
+The backs of horses and donkeys, these were the only mode of
+conveyance--miserable underfed creatures that tottered and stumbled
+along and not seldom stuck in the muddy lanes or fell in the ruts and
+rugged roads, and often broke their legs and their wares, and had to be
+shot where they lay--a happy release for the poor animals. Josiah saw
+all this, and realised that something must be done to remedy the evil.
+So in the midst of his watchful care and constant thought for his
+beloved potteries he made time to push the grand scheme of a canal that
+began gradually to see daylight. It was not pack-horses that would
+labour slowly to Birmingham and Sheffield, but a broad waterway to carry
+goods to Liverpool and other seaports. This was what his native county
+wanted. And so he subscribed largely to this, and helped to push a Bill
+through Parliament.
+
+"I scarcely know," he wrote, "whether I am a landed gentleman, an
+engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other
+characters by turns."
+
+In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him
+no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for
+long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of
+the Tiber in Italy.
+
+By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and
+fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with
+thousands of flourishing houses and workmen. And he himself was the
+mainspring of it all--the moving spirit.
+
+Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and
+indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice
+of the Queen--Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full
+development of that "cream" ware whose first beginnings had dawned on
+his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known
+the "Queen's Ware," and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might
+call himself "Potter to the Queen."
+
+And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered
+a "jasper dip," and he invented a special kind of ware of which he
+made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for
+Wedgwood's vases. "A violent vase mania," he called it himself. The
+mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened
+showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as
+great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself
+to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned
+beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation
+against the curse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro
+chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure:
+"Am I not a Man and a Brother?"
+
+Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he
+had been as a boy--hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand
+foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty
+study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays
+labelled and classified.
+
+Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He
+would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing
+"scamped." Well did the workmen know the "thud" of his wooden leg on the
+floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any
+article he did not think perfect.
+
+"That won't do for Josiah Wedgwood!" he would say.
+
+As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds
+and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it
+taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs,
+for he was very particular about having it often renewed. Partial
+blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his
+perseverance never failed.
+
+As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his
+family noted his failing powers--not of mind, but of body. Asthma was
+added to his other sufferings.
+
+"I am becoming an old man," he wrote. "Age and infirmity overtake me,
+and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than
+increase the objects of my attention."
+
+The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his
+jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his
+sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left
+the better for his passage through it.
+
+He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble
+potter's cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he
+had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but
+he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and
+distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing
+industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name. He was
+a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the
+thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything
+attempts the first beginning.
+
+But while we admire his splendid qualities, it is the singular beauty
+of his nature--a nature doubtless softened and sweetened by trial--his
+uncomplaining bravery, his thought for others, his simple, steadfast
+determination to carry through his life-work, in spite of the burden of
+weariness and sickness and bodily pain, that most of all speak to our
+hearts.
+
+
+
+
+GEORGE STEPHENSON.
+
+
+If a town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure
+to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings
+it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago
+there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere
+else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind
+horses. But now times are changed, and it is not wonderful that the name
+of George Stephenson, the man who has opened up the country and spread
+lines upon it like a mighty network, is a name to-day that people look
+up to as one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known.
+
+Most of us are fond of seeing the small beginnings of great endings, so
+it is natural enough that for us the tiny village of Wylam should be of
+deepest interest, for here George Stephenson first saw the light.
+
+[Illustration: "Stephenson fighting the fire in Killingworth Colliery."]
+
+We cannot visit Wylam without feeling at once that we are in the heart
+of the colliery country. Newcastle's lofty chimneys tower some eight
+miles off, and chimneys closer at hand belch forth great volumes of
+smoke and smut, and flaming furnaces shoot out lurid lights by night far
+across the country.
+
+In a common little wayside house, just a labourer's cottage, standing on
+the roadside, some 120 years ago a baby opened his eyes on a world that
+was to be rough enough at first for his young feet, though at last they
+were to land on the very topmost round of the ladder.
+
+The second child of the fireman of the old pumping-engine of the
+colliery of Wylam, little George was born to grinding poverty. Time as
+it passed brought other children besides George to the Stephensons, and
+soon it came to be a question how the fireman and his wife and six
+children were to live on 12_s._ a week!
+
+It was indeed a problem to solve and a struggle to face. When food had
+been got for the little mouths, what was left for clothes and schooling?
+Very little for the first, nothing for the second. No schooling
+certainly for little George, and so he spent his childhood between
+running errands for his mother and standing by his father's engine fire,
+where the boys and girls of the village loved to gather to listen to
+old Robert's wondrous tales, or to see the birds fed, for the old man
+loved birds of all kinds, and would save the crumbs from his own scant
+dinner to feed the robins. Here it was that baby George learned that
+early love of birds that lasted as long as life. As a boy he would catch
+and tame the blackbirds, and these would fly about the cottage all day,
+and at night come and roost at his bed-head. Years after, when he was an
+old man, he used to tell how, walking with his father one day, he parted
+some thick branches overhead and lifted the child in his arms that he
+might peep at a nest full of young blackbirds. It was a sight he never
+forgot.
+
+But, baby though he was, his days were not all spent in play. At home
+there were seven younger brothers and sisters to be nursed and watched
+and kept out of the way of the heavy waggons that were dragged by horses
+along the tram-road in front of the house, and much of this fell to
+George's share.
+
+As the years passed the Stephenson family, obliged like other colliers
+"to follow the work," moved to a place called Dewley Burn, and now as
+George had reached the age of eight he was ready to earn some money!
+
+To show how smart and quick the child was for his years there has come
+down to us a pretty story.
+
+He and his sister Nell had gone to Newcastle one day, and among their
+little commissions they were bent on buying Nell a new bonnet. They
+found the very thing she wanted in a shop, but the price was beyond
+their purse. It was 1_s._ 3_d._ over the mark, and the pair, sadly
+downcast, had to leave the shop. Standing crestfallen outside the boy
+suddenly exclaimed, "I have it! Wait here till I come back." Off he
+darted, and Nell waited while the minutes wore to hours, and still he
+did not come. Just as she began to think he must either have been killed
+or run over he dashed up breathless and thrust the coveted 1_s._ 3_d._
+into her hand.
+
+"But where did you get it?" she asked, astonished.
+
+"By holding gentlemen's horses," was the reply.
+
+The child's first situation at this time was with a woman who kept a
+farm and needed a boy to herd her cows and keep them out of the way of
+passing waggons. For this the little herd-boy was paid 2_d._ a day. How
+happy he was in long leisure hours to bird's-nest or whittle whistles
+out of reeds, or in company with another boy--by-and-by, like himself,
+to be one of the world's great engineers--to model toy engines out of
+clay, using hollowed corks for corves and hemlock stalks for steam
+pipes!
+
+Soon George advanced a step in life. His work was still
+farm-work--hoeing turnips for 4_d._ a day, leading the plough horses
+when his little legs could hardly stride the furrows, and working in
+the dawning hours of day when other children slept.
+
+But his heart was really at the engine fire or in the coal shaft. It
+was "bred in the bone," and he gladly returned to the black, grimy
+life, and along with his brother became a coal-picker, separating
+stones and dross from the coal, and so earning 6_d._ a day.
+
+By-and-by he was advanced to driving "the gin-horse," a horse that
+travels round and round at the pit's mouth drawing up and letting down
+by means of a rope wound round a drum, baskets of coal or buckets of
+water, and for this he was paid 8_d._ a day.
+
+Long miles he had to walk every day to and from his work, "a
+grit-growing lad, with bare legs and feet," and I think we may be sure
+there was not a bird's nest on that familiar road that the little
+bird-lover did not know by heart.
+
+His next rise was to a shilling a day. This was a great step up, and
+for this he had what was called a night shift, lading and unlading the
+coals as they came to the mouth of the pit, and reversing the rope to
+go down again. Monotonous enough work it was, but he held on to it for
+two years. And now another step up was at hand. It was a proud day for
+the boy--that Saturday afternoon when he was told that his wage had
+been raised to 12_s._ a week!
+
+"I am a made man now," he exclaimed in great delight.
+
+And now he was seventeen years old. He had really stepped beyond his
+father both in wage and position. But there was one thing which he
+had yet to master. It may seem strange to us, but George could neither
+read nor write. It began to dawn upon him then that things about
+which he wanted to know--pumps and engines and the great world of
+mechanics--could only be learned from between the boards of books that
+were closed to him. But with George to realise an evil was to try at
+once to mend it. Inside the boy's rough working jacket there beat a
+manly heart, with a great longing to make the most of his opportunities,
+to let no chance slip of doing his best.
+
+So he actually went to school at nights--three times a week, spending
+3_d._ out of his wages to be taught to read and write. He laboured on
+and made progress, and in time he wrote and read, and by-and-by he took
+another step and added to these arithmetic. With marvellous quickness he
+"caught on" to figures. In the long weary night shifts sitting by the
+blaze of the fire he would "work" the sums his master had "set" him or
+write his copies, just as years after, so eager was he to seize every
+opportunity that offered, he would many a time (in odd moments) chalk
+his sums on the sides of the coal waggons!
+
+So little by little, by untiring labour and unwearied industry, by
+"neglecting nothing," he rose. The miners who were his daily companions
+were, many of them, a rough lot. Their life was a hard one and their
+pleasures few, and on Saturday afternoons--pay-day--their amusements
+were cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and drinking in the ale-house, while
+the future great engineer might be found engaged in pulling to pieces
+his engine, cleaning it, getting to know it as we know the character,
+the habits, the face of our dearest friend, all the time laying in such
+a store of practical knowledge as was to serve him in good stead in
+time to come.
+
+Not that George did not delight in exercise. Indeed, few of his
+companions could equal him in athletics. There was nothing he enjoyed
+like challenging them to feats of strength in throwing the hammer or in
+lifting heavy weights. And even in comparative old age he loved to
+engage in a wrestle with a friend.
+
+About this time George had a favourite dog which he taught to fetch and
+carry his dinner in a pitcher tied round his neck. At the appointed hour
+the creature used to go straight to his master, turning neither to the
+right nor to the left. But one day he was beset with danger in the shape
+of a bigger dog with murder in its eye. George's dog closed with it, and
+a deadly tussle began, but it beat the bully and came off victorious
+but bleeding. When he reached his master the pitcher was there, but the
+dinner was spilt; but George was prouder far, when an onlooker described
+the fight, of his dog's courage than he would have been of the most
+sumptuous feast.
+
+But in spite of his larger wage money was scarce, and George beat about
+in his own mind how he was to earn a few extra shillings. With keen eye
+ever on the outlook for what lay nearest, he lighted on the _shoes_ of
+his fellow-workmen! He took to mending these, and he mended them so well
+that the pitmen soon got into the way of making George their cobbler.
+And from this he went on to making shoe-lasts for the village shoemaker.
+In this way it came to pass that in a fortnight's time he would
+sometimes make as much as L2. When he had by long and careful labour
+saved his first guinea great was his delight. "I am now a rich man!" he
+said.
+
+Yet another source of earning money was at hand. One day the chimney of
+his house went on fire, and being drenched with water, the soot and
+water together succeeded in damaging an eight-day clock that stood in
+his kitchen. Money was still scarce, and the watchmaker did not work
+without pay, so George set to work and took the clock to pieces, cleaned
+it, and put it together again. Rumours of this new "handiness" spread,
+and colliers from far and near sent their watches and clocks to him to
+doctor. It was almost as if nothing came amiss to these wonderful hands
+or, indeed, to that wonderful brain.
+
+A wheezy engine pump, a clock out of gear, a pair of worn-out shoes--he
+had a remedy for all. Painstaking, conscientious, thorough--the work of
+the boy shadowed forth the success of the man.
+
+If I had space I could tell you how, after he ceased to be a boy, he
+became a splendid man. That divine capacity--the creative faculty for
+making something out of nothing--that had been struggling long within
+him came to the surface, and he burst on the world as an Inventor.
+
+The boon he gave to men--the thing with which his name will ever be
+linked in history--is the Locomotive Steam Engine.
+
+What battles he fought for it when the country rose in arms and said
+they would rather hold by the old post-horses and coaches that had been
+good enough for their fathers! They were hard to convince. They declared
+if railways and trains came the country would be ruined. The engines
+would vomit forth smoke. No bird could live in the poisoned air. Game
+all over the country would be spoiled. The sparks that came from the
+engine would set fire to the houses near which they passed. Hens would
+stop laying! Cattle would cease to graze! The man who said he would send
+engines flying through the air at the rate of twenty miles an hour was
+a fool and a maniac!
+
+Then Stephenson showed the same patience--for the world was long of
+being convinced--as he had done on those long night-shifts, sitting
+lonely by the engine fire and working out his sums, or as years later,
+when prospects were very dark and money scarce, he wept bitter tears,
+"for he knew not where his lot in life would be cast."
+
+But though only a self-taught mechanic, Stephenson stuck to his guns in
+the face of the most skilled engineers in the land. For two long months
+the thing hung in the balance. It came before the great House of
+Commons. George himself was put into the witness-box. Single-handed,
+undaunted, he faced a world that was all against him. And then he had to
+bear the great trial of his life. The Bill was thrown out of Parliament.
+But still he did not despair. He looked into the future, and he saw
+himself conqueror. The Bill was again brought forward and eventually
+passed. I could tell you then of his long course of triumphs. How his
+engine, "The Rocket," won a L500 prize. How really the first seed of
+the Railway System of the world was sown then. How then he got leave to
+make a railway between Stockton and Darlington, and in time one between
+Manchester and Liverpool. How when, in 1830, the line was finished,
+people flocked in hundreds and thousands to see "a steam coach running
+upon a railway at three times the speed of a mail-coach."
+
+The people were carried away with excitement! The great steam-horse that
+we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be
+the world's greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the
+hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement
+broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they
+swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of
+them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a
+thousand throats.
+
+And now that he was successful, now that people praised where they
+had blamed, and pandered where they had scoffed, the man remained the
+same--modest, single-minded, just what he had been as the boy earning
+his shilling a day by driving the old "gin" horse at the pit's mouth.
+
+And now from the humble labourer's cottage he had climbed to the
+highest heights of fame. He was the first mechanical genius in the eyes
+of the world. The greatest in the land rejoiced to honour him. From the
+depths of poverty he had risen to wealth. Honours flowed in upon him.
+But the "boy is father to the man," and it was peculiarly true of George
+Stephenson.
+
+"I never want," he had said long years before, when he was earning
+L100 a year, and was able to keep a horse, "I never want to be
+higher."
+
+He was much the same as in those old days. There was no dazzling him
+with worldly display or worldly honours. He cared little for social
+distinctions. His instincts all along had been "to dwell among his own
+people." It gave him the keenest pleasure to have a day at Newcastle
+among the scenes of his boyhood, looking up the simple friends of his
+youth. And his tastes, too, remained in many ways just the old simple
+ones. When he was an old man, and nearing the end of his pilgrimage,
+when he was surrounded by every luxury of table and otherwise, he would
+call for a "crowdie," and with the basin of boiling water between his
+knees, would stir in the oatmeal with his own hands, watching it with
+great satisfaction, and then sup the whole with sweet milk, pronouncing
+it "capital."
+
+His last days were very peaceful. He removed from the swirling current
+of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place
+called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts
+and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the
+mind of a Greater Inventor than he. He took no part in business life,
+leaving it to his son, though now and then he would hear from afar
+echoes from the old world as the old war-horse scents the smoke of
+battle.
+
+There was no long illness to mar the end of his splendid energetic life.
+Those who had known him in the full tide and flush of health had not the
+pain of noting either physical or mental decay. He was at a meeting in
+connection with engineering in July. Some weeks later he took a severe
+fever, and after ten day's illness, without much suffering, the end
+came. On the 12th August, in his sixty-seventh year, George Stephenson,
+the great engineer, passed away.
+
+The whole civilised world bewailed his going. He had lived long enough
+for it to realise and appreciate the mark he had made on the age. But
+most of all did the colliers mourn him--the men to whom he had been as
+a kindly father, a leader, a hero. They laid him in the quiet little
+churchyard at Chesterfield, and they raised monuments to him all over
+the country, as a grateful people will do,--erected statues and memorial
+schools, and painted portraits. But a man like George Stephenson needs
+no memorial of stone. He has left an undying work to speak for him,
+and a character that has moved men to admiration everywhere for its
+simplicity, combined with its greatness, its manliness, that made
+it possible for him, the poor collier's son, to meet on equal
+ground--himself also being a man--men of the highest rank in the land.
+
+We cannot, any of us, imitate his genius or his power of invention, or
+his splendid physical strength, but it is within the scope of all of us,
+however young or insignificant, to copy his conscientious, unwearied
+hard work.
+
+"Ah, ye lads," he used to say to young men when he was himself an old
+one, in his broad, honest Doric, "there's none o' ye know what _wark_
+is!"
+
+He has left us a splendid example of patience, content, courage,
+attention to detail. But most precious of all, of a heart that beat
+as kindly in old age as in youth, that made him dearly loved by his
+workmen, and that never turned away from hearing and helping those in
+trouble.
+
+Riches and success and prosperity, crowding upon him in later years, had
+no power to spoil the simple beauty of his character, for the Wylam
+collier's son, besides being the world's honoured inventor, was also
+"one of Nature's gentlemen."
+
+
+
+
+THOMAS ALVA EDISON.
+
+
+To see as a boy the greatest inventor of the age, we shall have to cross
+the Atlantic and take a journey to the United States of America. England
+has done wonders in the way of discovery and invention, but it is to New
+England, as we call it, because she is a daughter of the old Mother
+Country, that we must go for a brightness and a sharpness of wit that
+sometimes make us think of the flash of polished steel.
+
+We all know the name of Edison. It is not a name of history, for he is
+living to-day, a man still in his prime, still sending out from that
+wonderful brain of his things that astonish men, and have won for him
+the name of the "wonder-worker of the modern world."
+
+I have before me as I write the picture of a square, brick house, with
+outside shutters hooked back, a white paling half encircling it, and a
+couple of bare, leafless trees before it. The house is plain and poor,
+and has a strangely unfamiliar look to our English eyes, but it is of
+the deepest interest to us as the birthplace of Thomas Edison.
+
+[Illustration: EDISON IN HIS LABORATORY.]
+
+The boy first saw the light in 1847, and though he came into the world
+with but a poor provision waiting him, he found himself welcomed with
+a very wealth of love and tenderness. Mrs. Edison had Scotch blood in
+her veins, and she was a mother in a thousand. It is a common thing
+in history to find that a son draws his greatness, many of his best
+qualities, from his mother, and this son took many of his from Mrs.
+Edison. She was his constant companion, his loving nurse, his gentle
+teacher during those early years of life that leave so deep an impress
+on the "afterwards."
+
+The child was seven years old when the Edison family moved to a place
+called Port Huron, and there he began to spend every spare moment in
+reading. So earnest was he that he set himself to read through the
+Detroit Free Library, and had devoured a close row of volumes before
+his attempt was discovered.
+
+Strange and solemn sound some of the titles of the books he read when
+he was twelve years old--a time when most boys are lightly dipping into
+newspapers and magazines and books of adventure. Burton's _Anatomy of
+Melancholy_, Hume's _History of England_, Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of
+the Roman Empire_.
+
+In 1862, when he was barely fifteen years old, he came out more fully
+from the shelter of home and mixed with the busy world, making a place
+in it for himself by his own young wits. He was a newspaper boy, and
+sold his papers like other boys, not stopping still in one place, but
+going on the train to different stations along the line, and selling as
+he went.
+
+About this time there was a great fever and ferment in America. The
+North were fighting with the South, and people panted for news of each
+battle as it took place. Papers with reports were devoured as soon as
+printed.
+
+"Now," thought Edison, "is my chance," and there began to work in the
+brain of the boy a big scheme. As the first step to carrying it out, he
+betook himself to the station telegraph clerk.
+
+"If," he said, "you will let me wire the war news on a few stations
+ahead, and have it written up on the blackboard, I will promise you some
+papers, and now and then a magazine."
+
+He repeated his request to the different clerks along the line. His
+eager face and twinkling eyes and earnest words won all hearts, and his
+request was granted. He next went to the editor of a well-known paper.
+
+"Give me a thousand copies," he begged, "and I will pay out of the
+proceeds of my venture." Here, again, he succeeded. And now it remained
+but to get the engine-driver to promise him a few minutes at the
+different stations, and he started on his venture.
+
+At the first stopping-place he had been wont to sell some half-dozen
+papers. That day, as he looked out, the platform was strangely crowded,
+and it suddenly dawned on him, from the eager faces of the people and
+their excited gestures, that it was _papers_ they wanted! He dashed on
+to the platform, and in a few minutes had sold forty at five cents each,
+or about a penny of our money. It was much the same at the next station.
+The people had read the headings on the station blackboard, and they
+crowded on to the platform, an excited, hustling mob, for papers! It
+dawned on the boy, here was a chance to raise his prices, so he doubled
+them, and sold 150 where he had used to sell a dozen! It was the same
+all along the line. At the last station--Port Huron--his home, the
+people were most excited of all. The town was a mile from the station.
+Edison started off with his papers, but was met half-way by an eager,
+hurrying crowd. They all wanted news. He stopped, drawing up in front of
+a church where a prayer-meeting was being held. Presently the people
+poured out and surrounded the boy, willingly paying him five times the
+usual price of his paper. He began "to take in," as he expressed it, in
+his own terse, telling words, "a young fortune."
+
+After this the busy boyish brain began to look eagerly ahead, to face
+life seriously. He did not start off on a fresh tack. He took hold of
+what was nearest to his hand, and he bent his mind on improving that. He
+had found people were in a hurry for news. The quicker they got it the
+better they were pleased. Nothing could surely be quicker than that they
+should get it damp from the press! So it flashed into his brain--why not
+print a paper on the train?
+
+The question was no sooner asked than answered.
+
+He looked about till he lighted on an old car, and he rigged it up as
+a printing-office with old types and stereos he begged from a newspaper
+office. In this novel press-room he threw off sheet after sheet of
+what he called _The Grand Trunk Herald_, the first and last paper ever
+printed on a train. The boy of fifteen was editor, compositor, and
+newsvendor in one. The paper "caught on," and the circulation went up
+to 400.
+
+But, alas! misfortune was soon to overwhelm the young adventurer. One
+unlucky day the printing-office--the old car, which grew daily more
+decrepit and unequal to the jolting of the journey--by a more violent
+lurch than usual threw over a bottle of phosphorus. The cork flew out,
+and in a few seconds the car was in flames. They were easily enough got
+under, but Edison's venture had received its deathblow. The furious
+car-conductor would henceforth have none of him. He boxed his ears, and
+pitched him on to the platform along with his precious belongings--the
+whole paraphernalia of his craft.
+
+It is a sorry picture that presents itself to our mind's eye. The boy
+standing half stunned, the rubbish and _debris_ of his belongings
+strewn at his feet, and the cherished old jolting car, the scene of his
+labours, gradually fading into distance! It seemed as if his bright
+dreams were all extinguished, his golden hopes doomed to come to
+nothing. As he stood there he faced it all--a mere boy low down in the
+world, badly fed, poorly clothed, almost penniless, but we do not hear
+that he either flinched or complained, or that a boyish sob rose in his
+throat. He was made of the stuff of the Stoic. It is our hearts that are
+sore and anguished, not chiefly for the hopes and dreams disappointed,
+but because of a terrible calamity that befell him then, when he was
+perhaps hardly conscious of it; but that grew darker and weightier as
+the years rolled on.
+
+When the irritated conductor had boxed the boy's ears, so brutal had
+been his onslaught that the delicate nerves were injured for life,
+and now with the flight of years has come deafness to wrap the great
+inventor in a partial mantle of silence. It is perhaps we who feel
+most the infinite pathos of the thing, while the man himself bears his
+affliction with the same noble patience with which he accepted
+disappointment long years ago as a boy.
+
+At that time he straightway turned his eyes bravely homewards. He picked
+up his precious belongings, and carried them to a cellar in his father's
+house.
+
+It was about this time that his mind began to bend towards that which
+has ever held for him a keen interest through life--the Telegraph. A
+waking ambition in him desired strongly to perfect himself in it. He
+was poor and friendless, and yet firmly, doggedly resolved to get on
+somehow. So out of his scant earnings--still as newsboy--he bought a
+book on Telegraphy, and this he pored over night and day.
+
+And now at this early age I think the great inventor must have touched
+that mine that was afterwards to yield him so wondrously of its wealth.
+
+The boyish mind was putting out feelers, gropingly at first, in the
+direction of creation, that divine faculty that is granted to so few of
+us. We can recognise the seed in its first tiny sproutings. He and a boy
+friend resolved to make a telegraph. They made a line of wire between
+their houses, insulated with bottles, and crossed under a busy
+thoroughfare by means of an old cable found in the bed of the Detroit
+River. The first magnets were wound with wire and swathed in ancient
+rags, and a piece of spring brass formed the key. Edison pressed two
+large and formidable-looking cats into his service, tied a wire to their
+legs, and applied friction to their backs. But the experiment ended in
+failure. The cats, frightened and furious, resented the liberty, and
+parted company with, the wire, dashing off in different directions.
+
+But failure never discouraged Edison, nor stayed the working of his
+brain. He was a true philosopher, and he was, like an elastic ball,
+possessed of enormous rebound.
+
+Handed down to us there is a story of the boy which, while it may not
+throw much light on his brain, throws some on his heart and on his ready
+courage. He was still a newspaper boy on the trains, and while at most
+stations a few minutes was the limit of waiting, at a certain station
+where shunting took place the minutes ran to half an hour. The boy was
+wont to spend this half-hour with the stationmaster's child, of whom he
+was fond, or to loiter about his garden. On this particular day the
+engine-driver had unlinked the cars in a siding, and one was being
+sent with a good deal of impetus to join another portion. It came on
+steadily, no one on it to control it, and right in its path was the
+unconscious baby smiling in the morning sunshine. Not a moment was to
+be lost. Edison threw down his papers and his hat on the platform and
+dashed to the rescue. And not a second too soon. As he threw himself and
+the child free of the line the car passed and struck his heel. The two
+fell with such violence on the gravel beyond that the stone particles
+were driven into their flesh, but they were safe!
+
+The grateful father was at a loss how he could show his gratitude to the
+rescuer of his child. He had little money and no reward to give. At last
+a plan occurred to him.
+
+"I will teach you telegraphing," he said to the boy, "and prepare you
+for the position of night operator at not less than twenty-five dollars
+a month."
+
+Edison was delighted. The bargain was struck. The wage seemed, no doubt,
+a small fortune to the boy--rather more than five of our English pounds.
+
+And now he had got his "toe on the tape," his foot on the ladder, if
+it were only on the lowest round. In three months he could teach his
+master, and the promised situation was got for him. From that he passed
+to other situations, and gradually he began to make his mark.
+
+He had a mind wonderfully quick to see a difficult situation and to deal
+with it.
+
+There is a story told of how one winter a severe frost had coated the
+great river between Port Huron and Sarnia, how the cable was broken,
+and people could neither get news nor send it to the opposite bank of
+the river. The spot was crowded with people, baffled and vexed. Edison
+came along with a brain rarely at fault and faced the thing. Suddenly,
+to the onlookers' astonishment, he mounted a locomotive and sent a
+piercing whistle across the water, imitating by the toots of the engine
+the dots and dashes of the telegraph system.
+
+In this way he shouted--
+
+"Holloa, Sarnia! Sarnia, do you get what I say?"
+
+At first there was silence on the part of the telegraph man across the
+water. The people on the bank were breathless with excitement. At last
+the reply came clear--thrilling. The man on the other side had
+understood, and the two cities could "talk" again to each other.
+
+After this, people began to hear of Edison's fame. But the mania for
+experiments had seized him. The cut-and-dried monotonous routine of work
+seemed flat and stale to him by comparison. It was as if an enchanted
+region of fairyland had been opened to the boy. To be allowed to revel
+in it he denied himself food and necessary sleep. When he was seventeen
+years old he invented a telegraph instrument that would transfer
+writing from one line to another without the help of the operator.
+
+There were no want of openings now for him to choose from, but sometimes
+doors after they had been opened were rudely shut again through envy
+and evil feeling. In the great world of invention and discovery there
+are perhaps more "ups and downs" than in any other. Some of Edison's
+fellow-workers were kind and generous--others were jealous and
+detracting. One manager did him an ill turn. He was unequal to
+completing a discovery he had begun. On the thing being shown him,
+Edison immediately "saw a light" and brought it to completion, but
+jealousy crept into the man's small mind and he dismissed the boy on
+a false charge.
+
+So at seventeen he was thrown again on the world. Money was still
+scarce. Books and instruments and calls from home swallowed up the most
+of it. The boy was chafing under ill-treatment and a sense of injustice.
+The want of sleep, perhaps of proper food, was telling on him, but he
+looked forward with a clear, undaunted eye. He wanted to reach a certain
+town where he believed work awaited him. It meant a walk of a hundred
+miles. He was weak, disheartened, ill-prepared for it, but he did it.
+He arrived footsore and weary, with torn shoes and tattered clothes,
+and his worldly possessions tied in a handkerchief on his back.
+
+In this shabby plight he presented himself at the telegraph office. He
+was eyed coldly enough at first, but by-and-by when tests were given he
+stood the tests. There was that in the eager eyes and underneath the
+shabby clothes that could not but make itself felt as a power. He began
+work. At first his fellow-clerks laughed at him. In time they were won
+over, and later he stood out as a workman of the first order.
+
+He began to collect about him materials for printing--machinery without
+which he never felt quite happy. He did a clever thing one day in the
+office that brought him into notice. He took a press report at one
+sitting--a sitting that lasted from 3.30 p.m. till 4.30 a.m.! After that
+he carefully divided it into paragraphs so that each printer would have
+exactly three lines to print, and so that a column could be set up in
+two or three minutes!
+
+It may be that about this time money was rather more plentiful, for
+Edison began to go to second-hand bookshops and so to gratify his
+deep-seated thirst for knowledge.
+
+His kindness of heart was well known, and there were many about only
+too ready to take advantage of it. There were telegraphists who roamed
+the country in time of war--"tramp operators" they were called, who took
+short engagements and generally ended their time with a "spree." These
+found out Edison--a man who did not drink himself and a man who might be
+persuaded to lend them money--and these were his worst enemies.
+
+One day he had bought at an auction fifty volumes of the _North American
+Review_. Half a dozen men were sponging off him in his rooms when he
+brought home the books and ranged them unsuspiciously round his walls.
+Directly he had gone out his guests helped themselves to his purchase,
+landed them at the nearest pawnbroker's, and drank the money they
+brought.
+
+But his love for experiments sometimes brought him into scrapes and
+disaster, as when he moved a bottle of sulphuric acid one day, strictly
+against rules, and the bottle spilt, the contents eating through the
+floor to the manager's room below and there eating up _his_ floor and
+carpet, the unlucky accident bringing Edison his dismissal.
+
+And now, at the age of twenty-one, after many different situations
+and different experiences, Edison turned his steps to Boston. His
+openhandedness had left him short of money. As was often the case with
+him, he was sailing very close to the wind. His dress was poor and
+shabby, and four days' and nights' travelling had not improved his
+appearance. When he presented himself at the office where he was to
+be taken on, the other clerks ridiculed him as "a jay from the woolly
+west."
+
+They made up their minds to play a practical joke on him. They took the
+New York telegraph man into their confidence. It was arranged he should
+send a despatch which Edison was to receive. By this time Edison had
+so perfected himself in receiving messages that he could write from
+forty-six to fifty-four words a minute--quicker than any operator in
+the United States.
+
+Not knowing his man, the sender began slowly--then quickened his
+pace. So did Edison. Quicker still he worked. Edison was in no way
+discomfited. Soon the New York man had reached his highest speed, to
+which Edison responded with ease, cool, collected, and stopping now and
+then to sharpen a pencil between.
+
+By this time he had discovered that the others were trying to get "a
+rise" out of him, but he went on steadily with his work. Then he
+stopped and spoke quietly through to the New York man.
+
+"Say, young man," he said, in his dry humorous way, "change off and send
+with your other foot."
+
+But the New York man had reached the end of his tether and had to get
+someone else to finish, and so Edison won his laurels, and "the jay from
+the woolly west" was regarded ever after with enormous respect.
+
+After that his place was in the front rank. Now he had reached the
+threshold of manhood, and a long, dazzling vista of achievement and
+success stretched before him had he known it. About this time a great,
+strong conviction of his responsibilities and of the opportunities life
+held out to him swept over him.
+
+"Adams," he said to a friend, "I've got so much to do, and life is so
+short, that I'm going to hustle."
+
+And if we try to look at what he has crowded into a life not long, we
+must allow he has indeed "hustled" to some purpose. As we briefly
+glance at the bent of his manhood, his doings fairly dazzle us. He read
+enormously all sorts of works on telegraphy and electricity, and he
+produced from his brain that which makes him the greatest inventor of
+the age. If we tried to enumerate his inventions the names alone would
+fill pages. We can do little more than name a few. Among the first of
+these was how to send four messages at the same time over one telegraph
+wire.
+
+But even after he had embarked on the glorious sea of discovery,
+what "ups and downs"--what sea-saws of fortune were in store for him!
+Hunger at times, torn clothes, and battered shoes. But from depths and
+half-drowning up again he always came to the surface. He rose grandly,
+relying on his own indomitable will. About this time good fortune befell
+him. For inventing some telegraphic appliances he got 50,000 dollars, or
+rather more than L10,000. He could hardly believe his good luck, and
+it was with this he immediately rigged up for himself a workshop.
+
+And now he was rapidly rising, and the field before him was gradually
+opening up wider and wider. He started a laboratory at a place called
+Newark, and from this time onwards his inventions seemed to flow from
+his brain in a well-nigh continuous stream.
+
+His workmen were devoted to his service. His genial good-humour and
+kindliness, the absence of all harshness in his manner, and his love of
+fun could not but endear him to them. They caught the infection, too, of
+his earnestness. When he had an idea in his brain he worked at it, as it
+were, red-hot, almost without rest or cessation, and they were rarely
+reluctant to help him.
+
+"Now, you fellows!" he would say, shutting himself and his workmen up in
+a room on the top flat, "I've locked the door, and you'll have to stay
+here until this job is completed."
+
+During sixty hours, perhaps, he would take no sleep and little food,
+while his brain would work at highest pressure until the thing was
+wrought. Then he would relax, and sleep for as long as thirty-six hours
+at a stretch.
+
+And now his fame had spread far and wide. The people at Menlo Park, to
+which he removed--some twenty-four miles from New York--began to look
+upon him as a wizard--a man possessing magical powers. It seemed to them
+there was nothing he could not do. Exaggerated tales of his wonderful
+powers spread over the country.
+
+"If people track me here," he said (he had been besieged at Newark), "I
+shall simply have to take to the woods."
+
+Child after child was the offspring of the inventor's brain. At one
+time, within the space of a few years, as many as forty-five were born.
+
+There was the Microphone, which is much like the Telephone, except that
+in the Microphone the sound is magnified. There was the Megaphone, which
+brings far-away sounds near, so that cattle crunching grass six miles
+off could be heard distinctly at Menlo Park! There was the Kinetoscope
+we all know, which by swiftly passing pictures--as many as forty-six
+a second--seems to give us a single person in motion, somewhat on the
+lines of that toy of our childhood, "The Wheel of Life." And there was
+the grand king of inventions--the Phonograph--that overtops all the
+rest.
+
+We know it, all of us, by this time. We have listened to it, with the
+tubes at our ears, while the voice of someone speaking at a distance is
+distinctly borne to us, or the strains of a song sung by some great
+singer.
+
+In 1888 Edison sent his first phonogram by steamer to England. His
+friend here had only to take out the wax cylinder, put it into his
+machine, and set it in motion, and lo! it seemed to him as if Edison
+himself were in the room talking to him!
+
+Great men all over the world recorded their astonishment and their
+praises of the wonderful invention. The Queen sent him a message of
+congratulation. People flocked to every exhibition to see it--to the
+French one from countries all over Europe. They saw it and straightway
+went into raptures. Edison himself, looking into the future, seemed to
+see volumes it might yet be brought to do. It might be used to write
+letters merely from dictation. It might be used to make clocks speak--to
+tell when it was time to come to meals. It might be used for toys. A
+tiny phonograph might be placed inside a doll, and it would straightway
+"talk"; or in a toy animal, and it would grunt and growl!
+
+What a strange thing that in this world of passing-away and change we
+should be able to preserve from destruction such treasures sheltered in
+a wax cylinder--some great man's words of wisdom, or the silver tones of
+a sweet musician!
+
+The more Edison's brain accomplished the more did it seem able to do. As
+a man he showed himself untiring as when a boy. He went on discovering.
+He invented a way of telegraphing from a moving train. He invented an
+Electric Railroad, that drew delighted thousands at the Chicago
+Exhibition.
+
+In 1879 his attention turned to lighting, and he bent all his energies
+on inventing an Incandescent lamp for electric light. He spent days
+working at a sort of white heat. He began on the 16th October, but
+mishaps and accidents seemed to threaten his invention.
+
+"Let us," he cried to his partner in a ferment of excitement--"let us
+make a lamp before we sleep, or die in the attempt." On the morning of
+the 21st it was done!
+
+It astonished the world. It opened up possibilities for miners and
+divers, and for men everywhere.
+
+On the occasion of its exhibition people flocked from all parts of the
+United States. Special trains were run. The same furore over the marvel
+reigned at the Paris Exposition, and at every other exhibition. And
+through it all--a fame, a popularity enough to turn the head of most
+mortals--the man remained the same--modest, simple, unpretentious.
+
+From Menlo Park he went to Orange. His laboratory there was fitted up
+with everything conceivable that an inventor red-hot and eager might
+want at a moment's notice. And yet often the workrooms presented the
+strangest appearance of disorder. Workmen sometimes stretched on
+benches or floor after a heavy strain, the great master himself thrown
+down--a stick under his head, a coat wound round it for a pillow, and
+so snatching a short interval of sleep! He will not be interrupted by
+visitors. In this great world of his own he seems at times to live a
+sort of separate existence.
+
+We are amazed, dazzled, astonished by the tremendous results one man in
+his lifetime has achieved. He has not been content to take some thing
+and modify and improve it and set it to a new purpose as men whom we
+call inventors have done in all ages. But he seems to have called upon
+the very forces of nature to do his bidding. It is almost as if he had
+harnessed the winds, the air, sound, electricity, for his purposes.
+
+A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life.
+This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of
+his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of
+what he has done. He lives sometimes in his northern home, in New
+Jersey, sometimes at Orange.
+
+As a man he shows the same genial, kindly sympathy which, as a boy,
+never failed to win the hearts of his fellow-clerks, the same modesty
+that disarmed their jealousy. These things chain his workmen to him
+to-day with links of love. Now that men praise and laud him all over the
+world he shows the same good-natured indifference to name and fame he
+has shown all through. And he has lost nothing of the tireless energy
+that used to support him through hard work and long night-sittings as a
+boy--this man who, as someone has it, "has kept the path to the patent
+office red-hot with his footsteps--this wonder-worker of the modern
+world."
+
+
+
+
+JAMES WATT.
+
+
+There is perhaps no inventor's name with which the British boy is more
+familiar than with that of James Watt. In every college of mechanics or
+engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent
+face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.
+
+It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before
+James Watt came into it--before, as it were, steam took its place and
+while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what
+steam now does with such apparent ease.
+
+On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving,
+seaport town of Greenock--the birthplace of James Watt. But in 1736,
+more than 150 years ago, it was little more than a picturesque
+fishing-village, looking out on a peaceful, smiling bay, where a few
+modest fishing-craft were to be seen, and beyond to the hills of
+Argyllshire, before smoke and funnels blotted the fairness of the
+landscape.
+
+In an unpretentious little house in a Greenock by-street James Watt
+first saw the light. His father was by trade a carpenter, an undertaker,
+a general "merchant," for there was little competition in those simple
+days, and men often "professed" more than one trade. In the course of a
+few years little James was left the sole surviving child of five, and
+perhaps on that account was specially precious to his parents. Neither
+as the years went on did he grow into a sturdy, lusty country boy, but
+rather struggled up slowly, anxiously overlooked by a mother's care, a
+prey to ill-health and headache, even in his baby years. So that most of
+his early education fell to his parents, his mother opening up to him
+the beginnings of reading, his father those of writing and arithmetic.
+
+School, to which he went by-and-by, proved a failure. Shy and shrinking,
+he cared little for the play of other children. He was slow at
+games, perhaps dull in class, and the boys and girls laughed at him.
+Ill-health, too, made it hard for him to get on. He liked best to be at
+home. For amusement he would draw in chalk on the kitchen floor, and for
+playthings he would choose his father's instruments. One day a
+neighbour remarked on the child's drawing.
+
+"He should be at school," she said, "and not trifling away his time."
+
+"Look first," said the father, pointing to the floor, "before you blame
+him. He is solving a problem in geometry."
+
+The child was then six years old!
+
+We are familiar with the story handed down to us through the centuries
+of how the dreamy-eyed boy was engaged in watching the steam hiss from
+the kettle-spout, the while holding a teaspoon below to count and catch
+the drops of water. Tradition likes to see in this the tiny seedlings of
+that mighty tree--the Condensing Steam Engine, but we fear that common
+sense in the shape of his robust-minded aunt was nearer the mark when
+she exclaimed--
+
+"James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy as you are. For the last hour
+you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and
+put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the
+steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the
+drops it falls into."
+
+For change of air the boy was sometimes sent to Glasgow, the great
+commercial capital being then no larger than a country market-town.
+Mightily astonished were his relatives, and, according to their own
+account, not a little scared, when of an evening his tongue was loosed,
+and he would launch into tales, wonderful things that held them
+entranced for hours, and sent them wakeful to bed. Was this time
+prophetic of those later years when he would hold men and women
+fascinated by the charm of his conversation?
+
+And now young James was sent to the Greenock Grammar School, but he made
+no great mark there, except in mathematics, in which he easily headed
+the class. But Latin and Greek are not a boy's only education. At home
+he was learning other things, from his parents' talk, from the pages
+of books. And then there were the long golden hours when he put on a
+leather apron like his father, and installed himself in his father's
+workshop with a small forge and a small bench all his own, and with his
+boyish fingers handled the tools so deftly and so cleverly that the
+workmen watching him exclaimed--
+
+"Little Jamie has gotten a fortune at his fingers' ends."
+
+But while he worked his mind was not idle. He read eagerly and
+precociously, as a delicate child sometimes does, devouring all such
+books as he could lay hands on. Solid enough reading they will seem to
+boys to-day.
+
+_The Cloud of Witnesses_, Henry the Rymer's _Life of Wallace_, Boston,
+Bunyan.
+
+Added to this was his parents' talk, that fell on his young ears and
+stamped itself on his young mind, and the picturesque surroundings of
+his home, for he loved nature's beauties--the hills, the stars, the
+trees. The mountains and the plains about his home were made romantic by
+memories and associations of Covenanting times, told him by his father,
+and his boyish rambles were made beautiful by wild flowers, and again
+there were long delightful days of fishing to add to these.
+
+But in the midst of all this struggling in the boy's mind was that
+strong leaning to mechanical invention longing for an outlet. It peeped
+out here and there--for instance, in being unable to see an instrument
+without wishing to discover all its uses. And so well did he show
+himself able even then to fashion delicate things like compasses and
+quadrants--an instrument in shape like the fourth of a circle--that his
+father, after much thought, made up his mind that James should learn
+the trade of a mathematical instrument maker.
+
+So in 1754 James came out from the shelter of home and launched himself
+on the great world, rather more of an ordeal to the shy, timid boy
+than it would have been to one more robust and enterprising. This was
+practically the last of Greenock. The peaceful fishing-village was never
+again to be his home. Naturally he turned his steps to Glasgow. We can
+picture the great event in the quiet household. The boy getting ready,
+his modest baggage, his clothes (his mother's tender care), a leather
+apron, some carpenter's tools, and a quadrant.
+
+But he was destined to go yet farther afield. No mathematical
+instrument-maker was to be found in Glasgow. A professor to whom James
+was introduced advised him to go to London. "To London" is an easy
+enough journey to-day--then it was a mighty undertaking. No trains--no
+steamers. One could only go by slow coach or on horseback. James chose
+the latter. His trunk was sent by sea from Leith, and he along with a
+friend set off on his long journey. He left on the 7th day of June, and
+travelling by Coldstream and Newcastle, he arrived in the great
+metropolis after a ride of twelve days!
+
+Most likely, although there might have been fear in the boyish heart, it
+also beat high with hope. Again and again has London made fair promises
+to boys such as he. But disappointment was to meet him on the very
+threshold. He found that apprentices who intended to serve a term of
+seven years were only accepted. This was very far from James's thoughts.
+What he wanted was to learn the trade, start off home again, and set
+up in Glasgow for himself as soon as possible. After many failures,
+however, he at last found a man willing to take him on for a year on his
+promise to pay twenty guineas with the results of his work during that
+time.
+
+And now began a time of stern work and self-denial. He took poor
+lodgings. He scrimped himself in everything but the bare necessaries of
+life. He spent on himself exactly eight shillings a week. He could not,
+he wrote, do with less. He scraped and pinched, remembering how ill his
+father could afford his keep.
+
+When he could get extra work he took it home at nights to his poor rooms
+and sat up late over it, often ill and weary. In a month he could make
+a quadrant better than any of the other apprentices. And so he struggled
+on against loneliness and headache and depression. It was rarely safe to
+venture out at night at that time in London, for sailor press-gangs were
+abroad. No able-bodied man was spared. In one night they took as many as
+1,000 men. Sitting as he did close to the shop door when at work, he was
+often exposed to cold, and caught rheumatic pains which did not leave
+him for many a day. After a year of this he went home to Greenock, in
+his possession some tools and instruments, and in his hands and brain a
+mighty store of skill and knowledge.
+
+Revived by his native air he set out again to seek his fortune--again
+to Glasgow. Again to be met with disappointment! He had not learned his
+trade in Glasgow, and therefore Glasgow would have none of him. Not so
+much as a workshop would it give him. It seemed almost as if there were
+no place open for the boy.
+
+But his friend the professor came to the front again. If Watt could find
+no place in the city, then the University should shelter him. And so
+they gave him a workshop twenty feet square in the old College grounds,
+and a room in which to sell his instruments, and he was at last fairly
+launched.
+
+But business progressed but slowly. He lived, to be sure, in an
+atmosphere that must have delighted him. The professors and the students
+found him out. They came and came again. He seemed always to have
+something original to say. He was a man who read much and thought
+much--humble as a child about his own attainments--eager with the
+generosity of the great man to give others their due--yes, even more
+than their due. They found out that he knew all about engineering, and
+not a little about natural history, art, languages--and then the trick
+of observation was so strong with him that nothing escaped him. In time
+it came to be the general opinion that the young instrument-maker was
+one of the ablest men about the University. But gratifying as was the
+making of these friends, they did not bring Watt in any money. Somehow
+his instruments did not sell well. He was too far from the town. Indeed,
+his business was so poor he sometimes thought of giving it up. It may
+have been there was a want of practical "push" in him, a quality he
+never gained all through his life. Somewhat discouraged he took to
+making fiddles and flutes and guitars and even organs,--but he was yet
+very far from making that fortune he had come out to seek.
+
+There are crises, turning-points in the lives of most people. They are
+seldom noisy. Sometimes, indeed, they come so quietly as to be hardly
+noticed. And now Watt was gradually nearing his.
+
+About this time his thoughts began to turn to steam. It may be that had
+he been busy and successful as an organ-maker, his great invention might
+never have seen the light.
+
+People had, of course, known for long that there was a power in
+water exposed to heat. Now in 1759, when Watt was twenty-three, his
+attention was drawn to the Steam Engine. He pondered it. After he had
+pondered it he set to work. His first model was a failure. But the
+idea had silently and firmly lodged in his brain. He went on with his
+everyday business, but ever in his leisure back sprang his mind to
+that subject that was to be his all-absorbing life-work. He read
+eagerly what other men had done. He got a model of another man's
+engine and he studied it. He found what he thought defects. He groped
+steadily on--now seeing a light--again thrown into darkness--now
+following what turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp--again getting
+hold of an idea that seemed to him a gem.
+
+There came to him gradually dawning thoughts. First, that of Latent
+Heat. Again, that a small quantity of water in the shape of steam heats
+a large quantity of cold water. Yet, again, that at 212 deg. water is
+elastic, and that steam heats six times the weight of cold water to a
+temperature of 212 deg., the temperature of steam.
+
+And so he went on step by step, till one day the thing burst on him,
+full-fledged, as it were--complete, dazzling, a perfect inspiration.
+
+It was a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1765. He was taking a stroll
+in a quiet part of Glasgow, now a paved and busy thoroughfare called the
+Green. A Sunday calm brooded over what was on weekdays a scene of busy
+life--of washing and drying clothes. His thoughts, as usual, hovered
+about his beloved theme. It inspired him with a very passion as a child
+of his own. The key to his engine--long sought--suddenly flashed before
+his mind's eye. The thing had been waiting incomplete for want of it. It
+came to him then--the idea of a Separate Condenser.
+
+A great uprising of his mind followed. In his solitary walk the
+flashing thought filled the man with rapture.
+
+Two drawbacks--waste of steam and waste of fuel--had been the ruin of
+former inventions.
+
+"Ye need not fash yourself about that, man," Watt said to a friend,
+answering some objection that he had made, "I have now made an engine
+that shall not waste a particle of steam."
+
+And so, though it was but the beginning, though years of weary labour
+and disappointment and discouragement waited him before the end was
+reached, the Condensing Steam Engine, as we have it now, first sprang
+into being that spring afternoon on the Green in Glasgow.
+
+And now the young inventor set himself with eager enthusiasm to make a
+model. There were no skilled workmen to be had, no self-acting tools, as
+in our day, and so the first model was only partly successful. But not a
+whit discouraged, he went on.
+
+"My whole thoughts are bent on this machine," he said. "I can think of
+nothing else."
+
+And now there remains but to tell in a few words--for it is the record
+of his manhood--the "ups and downs" just beginning, the disappointments,
+the failures, the hopes and fears that waited on this offspring of his
+brain. He was poor, and money was the first thing that was needed. Who
+would risk thousands on such a vague and shadowy thing?
+
+Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and
+he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread
+and butter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying,
+though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still
+ill-health to struggle against. "I am still plagued with headaches," he
+wrote about this time, "and sometimes heartaches."
+
+But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After
+failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone
+willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began
+to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion
+Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was
+to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his
+partial failure.
+
+"It was," he said, "a clumsy job." Watt grew depressed.
+
+In 1770 he wrote: "I enter on my thirty-fifth year, and I think I have
+hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world."
+
+A friend, seeing him cast down and unhappy, advised him to give up
+inventing. As well might he have advised the sun not to shine or living
+man to cease from breathing. Meantime the years went on. Watt was often,
+as he said, "heart-sick." Long years after, remembering this weary time,
+he said, "The public only look at my success." He stinted himself in
+everything but bare necessaries, for as yet his engine had paid him
+nothing and cost enormously. But light again arose in the darkness when
+he got as a partner Boulton, of Birmingham, and from that day onwards
+matters mended. Six of the fourteen years' patent were gone, but he
+succeeded in getting a renewal of it for twenty-four years by Act of
+Parliament, in spite of grumbling discontent of men who wanted to steal
+the fruit of his brain, and were thus prevented.
+
+Now he set to work in earnest. His first engine was made to blow the
+bellows of ironworks. His second to pump water out of the mines in
+Cornwall. In 1776 this was set up, and worked perfectly. "There it was,
+'forking water' as never engine before had been known 'to fork.'"
+
+"All the world are agape," he said, "to see what it can do."
+
+And it did well. And now the "voice of the country was in its favour."
+So the first step was taken. The others followed in quick succession.
+The partners worked together perfectly. Watt understood engines, but
+not men. He grew impatient, irritable, peevish if a workman were
+inefficient, and would have dismissed him on the spot. Boulton was
+wiser, and never failed to oil the wheels. Watt was despondent, easily
+cast down; Boulton was his "backbone."
+
+There came then into Watt's mind the idea of an engine that would
+produce _rotary_ motion. This he patented in 1781. All round and about,
+ready to pounce on it, were a perfect swarm of pirates.
+
+"One's thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them," he said. And
+again, "All mankind seem to be resolved to rob us."
+
+In 1782 the first rotary machine worked. After long waiting there was a
+brilliant result. It was made to drive a corn-mill. In our day it would
+be hard to say what Watt's rotary machine is not made to do. It is made
+for corn-mills and for cotton-mills, for sugar-mills and iron-mills. It
+drives our steamers and rolls our hammer-iron and coins our money and
+prints our books.
+
+And now the great inventor had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. In
+1790 he had an interview with the King, who asked about his engines.
+
+But he had not landed at the topmost round of the ladder without much
+painful climbing and many weary steps. His life had been all through
+shadowed by ill-health, and an anxious, worrying mind that refused to
+be calm. He had a shrinking distaste to business, and a fearful habit
+of looking on the dark side of things. Often would he have sunk in
+depression and despair had it not been for his cheery partner. It was
+only in the late years of his life that he came to know anything like
+peace. His mind all along had been too active for his body.
+
+But though as an old man he retired from public life and from
+business, he could not altogether retire from invention. He invented
+a letter-copying machine, and one for copying statuary. In his old
+age he lived very quietly in his comfortable house near Birmingham,
+furnishing what he called his Garret, a room where he might be alone
+and still invent, don again, as in boyhood, the leather apron, cook
+his own food, and ponder anew the details of those wonderful
+inventions he had given to the world.
+
+Friends admitted there found "the great Mr. Watt" simple, modest,
+careless of display--much as he had been as a boy--his voice low and
+kindly, with still its broad, homely Scottish accent. The world would
+have liked to draw him from his seclusion, to caress him, to make much
+of him. It offered him a baronetcy, but his simple tastes lay not at all
+in the direction of such honours, and he refused it.
+
+In 1819, when he was eighty-three, the end came. "I feel," said the
+great man with a calm in strange contrast to the fearfulness and
+timidity that had accompanied him through life, "I feel that I am now
+come to my last illness." He passed away quietly and without suffering.
+They buried him in Handsworth Church--near to his partner, Boulton--and
+erected an imposing statue in Westminster Abbey, and beneath it Lord
+Brougham wrote his famous epitaph.
+
+To us his life has much of pathos. Men have called him "the greatest
+inventor in all ages," "the most extraordinary man that the world has
+ever seen," but the long years of struggle and labour and waiting, the
+weakness of body and the oft depression of spirit, are to us not a
+little sad, specially when we remember how patiently he endured, how
+uncomplainingly he suffered, that we might profit, that he might, as
+Lord Brougham has it, "increase the power of man."
+
+
+
+
+Splendid Books for Boys.
+
+By GORDON STABLES, M.D., R.N.
+
+Large Crown 8vo, Bevelled Boards, Gilt Edges, with Illustrations.
+
+_FIVE SHILLINGS each._
+
+
+IN SHIPS OF STEEL.
+
+A Story of the Navy of To-Day.
+
+"A lively tale of the Navy of to-day, by that popular writer."--_The
+Guardian._
+
+"We say a great deal when we say it is quite up to the Author's usual
+level of exciting story telling."--_The British Weekly._
+
+
+FOR CROSS OR CRESCENT.
+
+A Romance of the Days of Richard the Lion-hearted.
+
+"A spirited, graphic story."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+IN THE DASHING DAYS OF OLD;
+
+Or, The World-wide Adventures of Willie Grant.
+
+"We can commend this book is the best story for boys which we have read
+for many a day."--_English Churchman._
+
+
+FOR HONOUR NOT HONOURS.
+
+The Story of Gordon of Khartoum.
+
+"Dr. Gordon Stables has written again the story of General Gordon, in
+'For Honour not Honours,' and no English boy will tire of reading
+it."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+ON TO THE RESCUE.
+
+A Tale of the Indian Mutiny.
+
+"A capital story of the Indian Mutiny. The boy who gets hold of this
+book is certain to thoroughly enjoy it."--_The Record._
+
+
+SHOULDER TO SHOULDER.
+
+A Story of the Stirring Times of Old.
+
+"More than a mere Story of the Stirring Times of Old. The tale goes
+close to the heart of the reader, because it has come from the heart of
+the writer."--_Aberdeen Free Press._
+
+
+ENGLAND'S HERO PRINCE.
+
+A Story of the Black Prince.
+
+"A dashing, graphic piece of work, well calculated to arouse the spirit
+of youth."--_Publishers' Circular._
+
+
+'TWIXT DAYDAWN AND LIGHT.
+
+A Tale of the Times of Alfred the Great.
+
+"Splendidly told and well illustrated."--_Pall Mall Gazette._
+
+
+OLD ENGLAND ON THE SEA.
+
+The Story of Admiral Drake.
+
+"Here we have told with much spirit the story of Admiral Drake. We have
+plenty of stories of the sea, _but what could be better than this true
+tale_?"--_The Spectator._
+
+
+HEARTS OF OAK.
+
+A Story of Nelson and the Navy.
+
+"Tom Bure, the hero, will charm every boy that gets hold of
+it."--_Literary World._
+
+"A story of the Navy and of Mighty Nelson, told with excellent
+spirit."--_Saturday Review._
+
+
+EXILES OF FORTUNE.
+
+The Story of a Far North Land.
+
+"A capital book; written with this popular writer's accustomed spirit,
+and sure to be enjoyed."--_Scotsman._
+
+
+TWO SAILOR LADS.
+
+Their Stirring Adventures on Sea and Land.
+
+"A sea story big with wonders."--_Saturday Review._
+
+"A capital story in Dr. Stables' best style."--_Spectator._
+
+
+FOR ENGLAND, HOME, AND BEAUTY.
+
+A Tale of Battle and the Breeze.
+
+"Dr. Stables has almost surpassed himself in this book. Certainly we
+have read nothing of his which has pleased us more--perhaps we might say
+as much."--_The Spectator._
+
+
+IN SEARCH OF FORTUNE.
+
+A Tale of the Old Land and the New.
+
+"The story is naturally and brightly written."--_Standard._
+
+"Just the book boys like."--_Schoolmaster._
+
+
+FACING FEARFUL ODDS.
+
+A Tale of Flood and Field.
+
+"An exceptionally good book for boys."--_Guardian._
+
+"One of the author's most fascinating stories."--_Leeds Mercury._
+
+
+_Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d._
+
+"LIFE ON THE OCEAN WAVE."
+
+A Cruise of the Good Ship "Boreas."
+
+
+LONDON: JOHN F. SHAW & CO., 48, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes
+
+In the caption of the illustration on page 102 "Stevenson" has been
+changed to "Stephenson" (Stephenson fighting the fire).
+
+On page 117 ' has been changed to " (of Nature's gentlemen.").
+
+On page 159 -- has been added (of youth."--_Publishers' Circular._).
+
+Otherwise the original has been preserved.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Boyhood of Great Inventors, by
+A. Fraser Robertson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOYHOOD OF GREAT INVENTORS ***
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