Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/402

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��Inventors as Mart\rs to Science.

��and those who from pride chose to leave a legacy to the public It was no use, however, telling Watt that he must not invent. One might as well have told Burns that he was not to sing because it would not pay, or Wilkie that he was not to paint.

For thirty years his life was one long battle : even when his eno-ines succeeded he could not rest. In his fragile, nervous, dyspeptic state every increase of business was to him in- crease of brain-work and increase of pain, until it seemed as if not only his health, but the very foundations of his reason, must give way. When at last the sunshine of prosperity was beginning to dawn on him, his mind, worn out by care and over-work, could not look cheerfully at the fut- ure, and he writes in a strain of pro- found melancholy : "I have been ef- fete and listless, neither daring to face business, nor capable of it ; my head and memory failing me much ; my stable of hobby-horses pulled down, and the horses given to the dogs for carrion. I have had serious thoughts of laying down the burden I find myself unable to carry, and perhaps, if other sentiments had not been stronger, should have thought of throwing off the mortal coil ; but if matters do not grow worse, I may, perhaps, stagger on."

Tlie uncommon neatness of the second Mrs. Watt must not be for- gotten in enumerating the trials of her husband. He carried on the op- erations connected with his later in- ventions in his garret, a room under the kitchen roof, small, low, lighted by only one window, cold in winter, hot in summer. He was obliged oc- casionally to write to his partners th.at

��he could not proceed further with his machine till the weather grew milder. Here he spent much of his time in the last years of his life. For days together he would confine himself there, not even descending to his meals, as he had provided himself with a frying-pan and Dutch oven, and cooked his own food.

Mrs. Watt, No. 2, was a thorough martinet in household affairs, and above all things detested "dirt." She tauojit her two pug dogs never to cross the hall without first wiping their feet on the mat. She hated the sight of her husband's leather apron and soiled hands, while he was en- gaged in his garret work ; so he kept himself out of her sight at such times as much as j)ossible. Some notion of the rigidity of her rule may be in- ferred from the fact of her having had a window made in the kitchen wall throusfh which she could watch the servants, and obsei've how the}' were getting: on with their work. Her passion for cleanliness was car- ried to a pitch which often fretted those about her by the restraints it imjtosed, but her husband gently sub- mitted to her control. He was fond of a kind of snuff which Mrs. Watt detested, and she would seize and lock up the unoffending snuff-box whenever she could lay her hands on it. A visitor in the family attirms that when she retired frou) the dining- room, if Mr. Watt did not follow at the time fixed by her, a servant en- tered and put out the light, even when a friend was present, on which the hen-pecked inventor would slowly rise and meekly say, — "' We imist go." He certainly can be ranked among the martvrs.

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