him an eminent consulting engineer, Mr. Charles May, and with a good deal of quiet tact, beat about the bush, trying to gauge my ideas on the value of my patents. He expatiated on the advantages of turning an invention to immediate account, and being not only well paid, but much overpaid, for all costs and labour expended in perfecting the invention, which, when purchased for cash, might be upset in law without any loss to the inventor, who had been wise enough to realise when he had the opportunity. This was the whole gist and meaning of a rather long introductory speech, and I distinctly remember the reply which I made at the time, and which I have often since repeated. I said: "Mr. Brown, the expense and labour that I may have had over this invention is no measure of its value. If you and I were walking arm-in-arm along the street, and I saw something glittering in the gutter, and if the mere fact of my being the first to discover it gave me a legal claim to its possession, and all the labour and trouble taken by me were simply to lift it out of the gutter with my thumb and finger, and if this little glittering thing on examination turned out to be the Koh-i-noor, then the Koh-i-noor being legally my personal property, I should want a million sterling for it, if that happened to be its ascertained commercial value, notwithstanding the fact of its having come so easily into my possession." I thus quietly gave Mr. Brown to understand that I was in no hurry to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. Mr. Brown then adopted another method, and attempted to dazzle me at once, so as not to spoil the effect of a grand offer by letting it slide out piecemeal. "Well," he said, "the real object of my visit is to make you an offer to purchase all your patent rights in Great Britain for your iron and steel inventions; and I will tell you at once how far I am prepared to go, and I can go no farther. I am prepared to give you £50,000 cash for them." I said: " Mr. Brown, I cannot but feel that this is a very handsome offer indeed, for an invention that has not yet passed from the scientific to the commercial stage, and it is conclusive evidence of the high appreciation of its value by a practical ironmaster, and manager of a great Welsh iron-works. But, Sir, if my invention successfully passes from the scientific to the commercial stage, as I doubt not it will do, it must inevitably revolutionise the iron industry of the whole world; and even the very handsome sum you offer is not a tithe of its actual value. No, Sir, I cannot accept your very liberal offer; it is a large sum to risk, and whatever risk there is, it is I who should run it. I have had dozens of proofs -- none of which you have seen -- proofs that make me certain of the ultimate result, and I am content to see the invention through all its trials and vicissitudes, and stand or fall by the result."

Mr. Brown was evidently taken aback by my steady refusal to accept a sum which he no doubt felt, and very reasonably so, would certainly tempt me. Indeed, I presume he brought Mr. Charles May simply to witness the bargain he felt sure of making, the written terms of which were most probably in his coat pocket. Intense disappointment and anger quite got the better of him, and for the moment he could not realise the fact of my refusal; he hesitated, muttered something inaudible, took up his hat, and left me very abruptly, saying in an irritated tone, as he passed out of the room, "I'll make you see the matter differently yet!" and slammed the door after him. We shall see, in a future Chapter, what were the steps taken by Mr. Brown to attain this end, and how far he succeeded.

In the meantime, small, upright, fixed converting vessels had been erected at the iron works of Messrs. Galloway at Manchester, at Dowlais in Wales, at Butterley in Derbyshire, and also at the Govan Iron Works at Glasgow, and in each case the results of the trials were most disastrous. The ordinary pig iron used for bar-iron making was found to contain so much phosphorus as to render it wholly unfit for making iron by my process. This startling fact came on me suddenly, like a bolt from the blue; its effect was absolutely overwhelming. The transition from what appeared to be a crowning success to one of utter failure well-nigh paralysed all my energies. Day by day fresh reports of failures arrived; the cry was taken up in the press; every paper had its letters from correspondents, and its leaders, denouncing the whole scheme as the dream of a wild enthusiast, such as no sensible man could for a moment have entertained. I well remember one paper, after rating me in pretty strong terms, spoke of my invention as "a brilliant meteor that had flitted across the metallurgical horizon for a short space, only to die out in a train of sparks, and then vanish into total darkness."

I was present at some of these trials, and saw the utter failure that resulted with the quality of metal operated upon. It is a curious, and scarcely credible, fact that not one of the ironmasters who had previously felt such abundant confidence in the success of the process as to back their opinions with large sums of