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entire project, and considered that the traffic would not amount to one-eighth of the estimate.

Mr. Stephenson was now anxious to be in England. During the journey from Madrid he often spoke with affection of friends and relatives; and when apparently absorbed by other matters, he would revert to what he thought might then be passing at home. Few incidents worthy of notice occurred on the journey homeward, but one may be mentioned. While travelling in an open conveyance between Madrid and Vittoria, the driver was urging his mules down hill at a dangerous pace. He was requested to slacken speed; but suspecting his passengers to be afraid, he only flogged the brutes into a still more furious gallop. Observing this, Mr. Stephenson coolly said, "Let us try him on the other tack; tell him to show us the fastest pace at which Spanish mules can go." The rogue of a driver, when he found his tricks of no avail, pulled up and proceeded at a moderate rate for the rest of his journey.

Urgent business required Mr. Stephenson's presence in London on the last day of November. They travelled, therefore, almost continuously, day and night; and the fatigue consequent on the journey, added to the privations voluntarily endured by the engineer while carrying on the survey among the Spanish mountains, began to tell seriously on his health. By the time he reached Paris, he was evidently ill; but he nevertheless determined on proceeding. He reached Havre in time for the Southampton boat; but when on board, pleurisy developed itself, and it was necessary to bleed him freely. During the voyage, he spent his time chiefly in dictating letters and reports to Sir Joshua Walmsley, who never left him, and whose kindness on the occasion he gratefully remembered. His friend was struck by the clearness of his dictated composition, which exhibited a vigour and condensation which to him seemed marvellous. After a few weeks'

rest at home, Mr. Stephenson gradually recovered, though his health remained severely shaken.

On his report being presented to the shareholders in the projected "Royal North of Spain Railway" in the course of the following month, it was so decidedly unfavourable, that the project was abandoned and the Company forthwith dissolved.

CHAP. XXXIV.

RESIDENCE AT TAPTON.

TOWARDS the close of his life, Mr. Stephenson almost entirely withdrew from the active pursuit of his profession as a railway engineer. He devoted himself chiefly to his extensive collieries and lime-works, taking a local interest only in such projected railways as were calculated to open up new markets for their products.

At home he lived the life of a country gentleman, enjoying his garden and his grounds, and indulging his love of nature, which, through all his busy life, had never left him. It was not until the year 1845 that he took an active interest in horticultural pursuits. Then he began to build new melonhouses, pineries, and vineries of great extent; and he now seemed as eager to excel all other growers of exotic plants in the neighbourhood as he had been to surpass the villagers of Killingworth in the production of gigantic cabbages and cauliflowers some thirty years before. He had a pine-house built sixty-eight feet in length, and a pinery one hundred and forty feet. The workmen were never idle about the garden, and the additions to the forcing-houses proceeded until at length he had no fewer than ten glass forcing-houses, heated with hot water, which he was one of the first to introduce in that neighbourhood. He did not take so much pleasure in flowers as in fruits. At one of the county agricultural meetings, he said that he intended yet to grow pineapples at Tapton as big as pumpkins. The only man to

whom he would "knock under " was his friend Paxton, the gardener to the Duke of Devonshire; and he was so old in the service, and so skilful, that he could scarcely hope to beat him. Yet his "Queen" pines did take the first prize at a competition with the duke, though this was not until shortly after his death, when the plants had become more fully grown. His grapes also recently took the first prize at Rotherham, at a competition open to all England. He was extremely successful in producing melons, having invented a method of suspending them in baskets of wire gauze, which, by relieving the stalk from tension, allowed nutrition to proceed more freely, and better enabled the fruit to grow and ripen. Amongst his other erections, he built a joiner's shop, where he kept a workman regularly employed in carrying out his many ingenious contrivances of this sort.

He took much pride also in his growth of cucumbers. He raised them very fine and large, but he could not make them grow straight. Place them as he would, notwithstanding all his propping of them, and humouring them by modifying the application of heat and the admission of light for the purpose of effecting his object, they would still insist on growing crooked in their own way. At last he had a number of glass cylinders made at Newcastle, for the purpose of an experiment; into these the growing cucumbers were inserted, and then he succeeded in growing them perfectly straight. Carrying one of the new products into his house one day, and exhibiting it to a party of visitors, he told them of the expedient he had adopted, and added gleefully, "I think I have bothered them noo!"

Mr. Stephenson also carried on farming operations with some success. He experimented on manure, and fed cattle after methods of his own. He was very particular as to breed and build in stock-breeding. "You see, sir," he said to one gentleman, "I like to see the coo's back at a gradient some

thing like this" (drawing an imaginary line with his hand), "and then the ribs or girders will carry more flesh than if they were so, or so." When he attended the county agricultural meetings, which he frequently did, he was accustomed to take part in the discussions, and he brought the same vigorous practical mind to bear upon questions of tillage, drainage, and farm economy, which he had been accustomed to exercise on mechanical and engineering matters. At one of the meetings of the North Derbyshire Agricultural Society, he favoured the assembled farmers with an explanation of his theory of vegetation. The practical conclusion to which it led was, that the agriculturist ought to give as much light and heat to the soil as possible. At the same time he stated his opinion that, in some cold soils, water contributed to promote vegetation, rather than to impede it as was generally believed; for the water, being exposed to the sun and atmosphere, became specifically warmer than the earth it covered, and when it afterwards irrigated the fields, it communicated this additional heat to the soil which it permeated.

All his early affection for birds and animals revived. He had favourite dogs, and cows, and horses; and again he began to keep rabbits, and to pride himself on the beauty of his breed. There was not a bird's nest upon the grounds that he did not know of; and from day to day he went round watching the progress which the birds made with their building, carefully guarding them from injury. No one was more minutely acquainted with the habits of British birds, the result of a long, loving, and close observation of nature.

At Tapton he remembered the failure of his early experiment in hatching birds' eggs by heat, and he now performed it successfully, being able to secure a proper apparatus for maintaining a uniform temperature. He was also curious about the breeding and fattening of fowls; and when his friend Edward Pease of Darlington visited him at Tapton,

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