less old pedant, as he had been in the way of considering himself, might perhaps do something even more important than his previous achievement to save this young girl from the dangers that surrounded her. He loved his classics and his old books; he took an interest, too, in the newspapers and periodicals that brought the fermenting thought and the electric life of the great world into his lonely study; but these things just about him were getting strong hold on him, and most of all the fortunes of this beautiful young woman. How strange ! For a whole generation he had lived in no nearer relation to his fellow-creatures than that of a half-fossilized teacher; and all at once he found himself face to face with the very most intense form of life, the counsellor of threatened innocence, the champion of imperilled loveliness. What business was it of his? growled the lower nature, of which he had said in "Thoughts on the Universe,"-"Every man leads or is led by something that goes on four legs."

Then he remembered the grand line of the African freedman, that makes all human interests everybody's business, and had a sudden sense of dilatation and evolution, as it were, in all his dimensions, as if he were a head taller, and a foot bigger round the chest, and took in an extra gallon of air at every breath. Then you who have written a book that holds your heart-leaves between its pages will understand the movement he took down "Thoughts on the Universe" for a refreshing draught from his own wellspring. He opened as chance ordered it, and his eyes fell on the following passage:

good? It always seems to me that I find something to the point when I open that book. Some things can be done as well as others,' can they? Suppose I should try what I can do by visiting Miss Myrtle Hazard? I think I may say I am old and incombustible enough to be trusted. She does not seem to be a safe neighbor to very inflammable bodies!

The Fire-hang-bird was in her nest, the little hanging chamber, when Master Byles Gridley called at The Poplars to see her. Miss Cynthia, who received him, saw fit to carry him somewhat abruptly up to Myrtle's room. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did so, his visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery. Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and passed it, and was in full possession. She sat with her worsted pattern held bravely in sight, and her cheek as bright as its liveliest crimson.

"Miss Cynthia has shown me up to the boudoir," he said, "or I should not have ventured into the adyta of this ancient temple. A work of art, is it, Miss Myrtle Hazard?"

"Only a pair of slippers, Mr. Gridfor my pastor."

ley,

"Oh! oh! That is well. A good old man. I have a great regard for the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. I wish all ministers were as good and simple and pure-hearted as the Rev. Eliphalet Pemberton. And I wish all the young people thought as much about their elders as you do, Miss Myrtle Hazard. We that are old love little acts of kindness. You gave me more pleasure than you knew of, my dear, when you worked that handsome cushion for me. The old minister will be greatly pleased, · poor old man !”

"But, Mr. Gridley, I must not let you think these are for Father Pemberton. They are for Mr. Stoker."

"The Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker! He is not an old man, the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker. He may perhaps be a widower before a great while. Does he know that you are working those slippers for him?"

"Dear me! no, Mr. Gridley. I meant them for a surprise to him. He has been so kind to me, and understands me so much better than I thought anybody did. He is so different from what I thought; he makes religion so perfectly simple, it seems as if everybody would agree with him, if they could only hear him talk."

66

"I hope it is so, my dear young lady. But listen to me one moment. I love you, my dear child, do you know, as if I were your own-grandfather." (There was moral heroism in that word.) "I love you as if you were of my own blood; and so long as you trust me, and suffer me, I mean to keep watch against all dangers that threaten you in mind, body, or estate. You may wonder at me, you may sometimes doubt me; but until you say you distrust me, when any trouble comes near you, you will find me there. Now, my dear child, you ought to know that the

"Too much, almost, I am afraid. He says he has been too hard in his sermons sometimes, but it was for fear he should not impress his hearers enough."

"Don't you think he worries himself about the souls of young women rather more than for those of old ones, Myrtle?"

There was something in the tone of this question that helped its slightly sarcastic expression. Myrtle's jealousy for her minister's sincerity was roused. "How can you ask that, Mr. Gridley? I am sure I wish you or anybody could have heard him talk as I have. There is no age in souls, he says; and I am sure that it would do anybody good to hear him, old or young."

"No age in souls, no age in souls. Souls of forty as young as souls of fifteen; that's it." Master Gridley did not say this loud. But he did speak as follows: "I am glad to hear what you say of the Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker's love of being useful to people of all ages. You have had comfort in his companionship, and there are others who might be very glad to profit by it. I know a very excellent person who has had trials, and is greatly interested in religious conversation. Do you think he would be willing to let this friend of mine share in the privileges of spiritual intercourse which you enjoy?"

There was but one answer possible. Of course he would.

reputation of being too fond of prosecuting religious inquiries with young and handsome women."

-

Myrtle's eyes fell, - a new suspicion seemed to have suggested itself. "He wanted to get up a spiritual intimacy with our Susan Posey, — a very pretty girl, as you know.”

Myrtle tossed her head almost imperceptibly, and bit her lip.

"I suppose there are a dozen young people that have been talked about with him. He preaches cruel sermons in his pulpit, cruel as death, and coldblooded enough to freeze any mother's blood if Nature did not tell her he lied, and then smooths it all over with the first good-looking young woman he can get to listen to him."

Myrtle had dropped the slipper she was working on.

"Tell me, my dear, would you be willing to give up meeting this man alone, and gratify my friend, and avoid all occasion of reproach?

"Of course I would," said Myrtle, her eyes flashing, for her doubts, her shame, her pride, were all excited. "Who is your friend, Mr. Gridley ?” "An excellent woman, Mrs. Hopkins. You know her, Gifted Hopkins's mother, with whom I am residing. Shall the minister be given to understand that you will see him hereafter in her company?"

Myrtle came pretty near a turn of her old nervous perturbations. "As you say," she answered. "Is there

nobody that I can trust, or is everybody hunting me like a bird?" She hid her face in her hands.

"You can trust me, my dear," said Byles Gridley. "Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern, it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that, Myrtle, one stitch at a time, taken patiently, and the pattern

will come out all right like the embroidery. You can trust me. Good by, my dear."

"Let her finish the slippers," the old man said to himself as he trudged home, "and make 'em big enough for Father Pemberton. He shall have his feet in 'em yet, or my name is n't Byles Gridley!"

Ν

IN Cornhill, Boston, thirty years ago.

there was a shop for the manufacture and repair of nautical instruments and philosophical apparatus, kept by Ari Davis. Mr. Davis was a very ingenious mechanic, who had invented a successful dovetailing machine, much spoken of at the time, when inventions were not as numerous as they are now. Being thus a noted man in his calling, he gave way to the foible of affecting an oddity of dress and deportment. It pleased him to say extravagant and nonsensical things, and to go about singing, and to attract attention by unusual garments. Nevertheless, being a really skilful mechanic, he was frequently consulted by the inventors and improvers of machinery, to whom he sometimes gave a valuable suggestion.

In the year 1839, two men in Boston one a mechanic, and the other a capitalist were striving to produce a knitting-machine, which proved to be a task beyond their strength. When the inventor was at his wit's end, his capitalist brought the machine to the shop of Ari Davis, to see if that eccentric genius could suggest the solution of the difficulty, and make the machine work. The shop, resolving itself into a committee of the whole, gathered about the knitting-machine and its proprietor, and were listening to an explanation of its principle, when Davis, in his wild, extravagant way, broke in with these

words : "What are you bothering yourselves with a knitting-machine for ? Why don't you make a sewing-machine?"

"I wish I could," said the capitalist; "but it can't be done."

"O, yes, it can," said Davis; "I can make a sewing-machine myself."

"Well," said the other, "you do it, Davis, and I'll insure you an independent fortune."

There the conversation dropped, and it was never resumed. The boastful remark of the master of the shop was considered merely one of his sallies of affected extravagance, as it really was; and the response of the capitalist to it was uttered without a thought of producing an effect. Nor did it produce any effect upon the person to whom it was addressed. Davis never attempted to construct a sewing-machine.

Among the workmen who stood by and listened to this conversation was a young man from the country, a new hand, named Elias Howe, then twenty years old. The person whom we have named the capitalist, a well-dressed and fine-looking man, somewhat consequential in his manners, was an imposing figure in the eyes of this youth, new to city ways; and he was much impressed with the emphatic assurance that a fortune was in store for the man who should invent a sewing-machine. He

was the more struck with it, because he had already amused himself with inventing some slight improvements, and recently he had caught from Davis the habit of meditating new devices. The spirit of invention, as all mechanics know, is exceedingly contagious. One man in a shop who invents something that proves successful will give the mania to half his companions, and the very apprentices will be tinkering over a device after their day's work is done. There were other reasons, also, why a conversation so trifling and accidental should have strongly impressed itself upon the mind of this particular youth. Before that day, the idea of sewing by the aid of a machine had never occurred to him.

ELIAS HOWE, the inventor of the sewing-machine, was born in 1819, at Spencer, in Massachusetts, where his father was a farmer and miller. There was a grist-mill, a saw-mill, and a shingle-machine on the place; but all of them together, with the aid of the farm, yielded but a slender revenue for a man blessed with eight children. It was a custom in that neighborhood, as in New England generally, forty years ago, for families to carry on some kind of manufacture at which children could assist. At six years of age, Elias Howe worked with his brothers and sisters at sticking the wire teeth into strips of leather for "cards," used in the manufacture of cotton. As soon as he was old enough, he assisted upon the farm and in the mills, attending the district school in the winter months. He is now of opinion, that it was the rude and simple mills belonging to his father which gave his mind its bent toward machinery; but he cannot remember that this bent was very decided, nor that he watched the operation of the mills with much attention to the mechanical principles involved. He was a careless, play-loving boy, and the first eleven years of his life passed without an event worth recording. At eleven he went to "live out with a farmer of the neighborhood, intending to remain until he was twenty

one.

A kind of inherited lameness ren

dered the hard work of a farmer's boy distressing to him, and, after trying it for a year, he returned to his father's house, and resumed his place in the mills, where he continued until he was sixteen.

One of his young friends, returning from Lowell about this time, gave him such a pleasing description of that famous town, that he was on fire to go thither. In 1835, with his parents' reluctant consent, he went to Lowell, and obtained a learner's place in a large manufactory of cotton machinery, where he remained until the crash of 1837 closed the mills of Lowell, and sent him adrift, a seeker after work. He went to Cambridge, under the shadow of venerable Harvard. He found employment there in a large machine-shop, and was set at work upon the new hemp-carding machinery invented by Professor Treadwell. His cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, since Speaker of the House of Representatives and Major-General, worked in the same shop and boarded in the same house with him. After working a few months at Cambridge, Elias Howe found employment more congenial in Boston, at the shop of Ari Davis, where the conversation occurred which we have just related.

Judging merely by appearances, no one would have pitched upon him as the person likely to make one of the revolutionizing inventions of the age. Undersized, curly-headed, and exceedingly fond of his joke, he was at twenty more a boy than a man. Nor was he very proficient in his trade, nor inclined to put forth extra exertion. Steady labor was always irksome to him, and frequently, owing to the constitutional weakness to which we have alluded, it was painful. He was not the person to seize an idea with avidity, and work it out with the passionate devotion of a Watt or a Goodyear. The only immediate effect upon him of the conversation in the shop of Mr. Davis was to induce a habit of reflecting upon the art of sewing, watching the process as performed by hand, and wondering whether it was within the

compass of the mechanic arts to do it by machinery. His uppermost thought, in those years, was, What a waste of power to employ the ponderous human arm, and all the intricate machinery of the fingers, in performing an operation so simple, and for which a robin's strength would suffice! Why not draw twelve threads through at once, or fifty? And sometimes, while visiting a shop where army and navy clothing was made, he would look at the heaps of unsewed garments, all cut alike, all requiring the same stitch, the same number of stitches, and the same kind of seam, and say to himself, “What a pity this cannot be done by machinery! It is the very work for a machine to do." Such thoughts, however, only flitted through his mind now and then: he was still far from any serious attempt to construct a machine for sewing up the blue trousers.

At twenty-one, being still a journeyman machinist, earning nine dollars a week, he married; and, in time, children came with inconvenient frequency. Nine dollars is a fixed quantity, or, rather, it was then; and the addition of three little mouths to be fed from it, and three little backs to be clothed by it, converted the vivacious father into a thoughtful and plodding citizen. His day's labor at this time, when he was upon heavy work, was so fatiguing to him, that, on reaching his home, he would sometimes be too exhausted to eat, and he would go to bed, longing, as we have heard him say, "to lie in bed for ever and ever." It was the pressure of poverty and this extreme fatigue that caused him, about the year 1843, to set about the work of inventing the machine which, he had heard four years before, would be "an independent fortune" to the inventor. Then it was that he caught the inventor's mania, which gives its victims no rest and no peace till they have accomplished the work to which they have abandoned themselves.

He wasted many months on a false scent. When he began to experiment, his only thought was to invent a maNO. 115. 34

VOL. XIX.

chine which should do what he saw his wife doing when she sewed. He took it for granted that sewing must be that, and his first device was a needle pointed at both ends, with the eye in the middle, that should work up and down through the cloth, and carry the thread through it at each thrust. Hundreds of hours, by night and day, he brooded over this conception, and cut many a basket of chips in the endeavor to make something that would work such a needle so as to form the common stitch. He could not do it. One day, in 1844, the thought flashed upon him, Is it necessary that a machine should imitate the performance of the hand? May there not be another stitch? This Iwas the crisis of the invention. The idea of using two threads, and forming a stitch by the aid of a shuttle and a curved needle with the eye near the point, soon occurred to him, and he felt that he had invented a sewing-machine. It was in the month of October, 1844, that he was able to convince himself, by a rough model of wood and wire, that such a machine as he had projected would sew.

At this time he had ceased to be a journeyman mechanic. His father had removed to Cambridge to establish a machine for cutting palm-leaf into strips for hats, - a machine invented by a brother of the elder Howe. Father and son were living in the same house, into the garret of which the son had put a lathe and a few machinist's tools, and was doing a little work on his own account. His ardor in the work of invention robbed him, however, of many hours that might have been employed, his friends thought, to better advantage by the father of a family. He was extremely poor, and his father had lost his palm-leaf machine by a fire. With an invention in his head that has since given him more than two hundred thousand dollars in a single year, and which is now yielding a profit to more than one firm of a thousand dollars a day, he could scarcely provide for his little family the necessaries of life. Nor could his in