all was good-humour and high expectation; tickets were flourished from innumerable carriage windows, and fair ladies in their sweetest and most persuasive tones, asked aid of the police, who were powerless to help them. Another half-hour from the Piccadilly entrance brought us in full sight of the fairy palace, which sparkled in the sun, but was as yet a few hundred yards distant. But we were in an almost solid mass of carriages, horses, policemen, and pedestrians. A look at my watch showed me that there was no hope for us if we kept our seats in the brougham. We were within fifty yards of the building, and we agreed to get out and chance struggling up to the door on foot. Hundreds of ladies in their satin shoes descended from their carriages to the gravel, and with their beautiful dresess pulled tightly round them, trusted to their feet. In charge of my two ladies I showed my tickets and got, at last, passed on to the doors, which we entered ten minutes before the appointed time, and just three hours after we had started. We hurried to our places, and could now breathe more freely; the air was full of perfume from the sweet flowers that filled all vacant places, and added a lustre to the gorgeous scene. When the formal processions had gone round the building, there came the one great treat of the opening day, never to be forgotten by those who heard it. The sister of my old friend Alfred Novello, Miss Clara Novello, sang the National Anthem, and by a supreme effort, her full melodious voice filled the whole space with a glorious volume of sound that could not fail to inspire the deepest feeling of loyalty. And as her voice rose and fell to the cadences of the beautiful Anthem, the thousands of faces of those present showed at a glance how all were moved by feelings of deep emotion and loyalty to Her Most Gracious Majesty, and to Prince Albert, whose cherished dream of the International Exhibition was thus so happily realised.

Returning again to the quiet daily routine, life at that period found me pretty regular in my attendance at the office in Queen Street Place, where I often spent a few hours with some client, who had sought advice in reference to an invention, possibly more or less crude and impracticable, or, it may be, of great value if only a little more mechanical knowledge had been expended on its details. Such investigations were sometimes very interesting; and I well remember several inventions which were brought before me at that time, and which have since taken their place among the important mechanical improvements of the present century; while many others that were essentially bad and wholly impracticable were fought for by their luckless inventors with a tenacity worthy of a better cause. It was just this class of inventors that one could not convince of the false notions under which they laboured; if a man knew so little of mechanical laws as to suppose that by some tricky arrangement of levers which he had devised he could make the descent of 20 lb. lift up 40 lb. to the same height, it took a vast deal of labour to convince him of his error; and he paid consultation fees with the inward belief still clinging to him that, somehow or other he was right, only he could not make me see things in the proper light. But generally I found it possible to bring home to the most prejudiced minds such unpleasant facts, and I have in many cases received the most frank and friendly acknowledgments from men who would have spent hundreds of pounds in search of the impossible had not an hour's discussion shown the fallacy of their convictions.

During the years 1852 and 1853, I was very busy with inventions of my own, for I find that in those two years I took out no less than twelve patents, that is, on an average, one every two months. These being mechanical inventions relating to manufactures, there arose, in each case, much studying of details, and many original drawings had to be made in addition to the specifications to be written and claims to be settled. Some of these were followed up with results that were highly satisfactory; but it was my misfortune that inventions sprung up in my mind without being sought, and as soon as a new idea presented itself there was no peace for me until the first crude notions were shaped and moulded into a tangible form, and this again criticised and improved upon. Then came experimental research, or in many cases the invention was patented as a mere theoretical deduction because it had to make room for the next: whereas each invention, to be made a commercial success, required to be carefully and forcibly brought under the notice of the particular trade to which it referred.

In regard to one of these patents of 1853 I will just say a word or two, as a mere record of a first proposal to stop a railway train by the simultaneous application of a brake on every carriage wheel of the train. I fully appreciated the advantages of this simultaneous action on every wheel, because by such means a train of twenty or thirty carriages could be stopped just as quickly and as easily as a single carriage,