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114 The schoolmasters of two hemispheres owe Gillott a debt of gratitude which they do not realize for what he has done for them. I once taught school for a year, and from my own experience should estimate the hours then employed by American schoolmasters in slitting and pointing goose-quills with their penknives in a single year would make a century. The very term "penknife" will probably be perpetuated for ever as a memento of a process that did sorely try thousands of patient and virtuous souls employed in teaching children to write. Indeed, the invention of the steel pen was an absolute necessity, as much as was the use of pit coal in England when first discovered. As well might you expect to feed all the house-fires, furnaces, and forges of the kingdom with wood fuel grown on the island as to find goose-quills enough on the face of the globe to furnish the writing world with pens. And the cutlers of Sheffield had got on a little further into the light of political economy than to follow the example of some stiff protectionists we have noticed, or to appeal to Parliament or the Prince of Wales to put a stop to Gillott's steel pens which could be made without Sheffield penknives. Even if they at first regarded him as poacher on their preserves, the man who acted for him as guide was a Sheffield artisan, who made the first steel pen. It was a rude thing at first, being made on