ur, saved him, and won her consent.

Then followed one of the happiest epochs in Jenkin's life. After leaving
Penn's he worked at railway engineering for a time under Messrs. Liddell
and Gordon; and, in 1857, became engineer to Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co.,
of Gateshead, who shared the work of making the first Atlantic cable
with Messrs. Glass, Elliott & Co., of Greenwich. Jenkin was busy
designing and fitting up machinery for cableships, and making electrical
experiments. 'I am half crazy with work,' he wrote to his betrothed;
'I like it though: it's like a good ball, the excitement carries you
through.' Again he wrote, 'My profession gives me all the excitement and
interest I ever hope for.'... 'I am at the works till ten, and sometimes
till eleven. But I have a nice office to sit in, with a fire to myself,
and bright brass scientific instruments all round me, and books to read,
and experiments to make, and enjoy myself amazingly. I find the study of
electricity so entertaining that I am apt to neglect my other
work.'... 'What shall I compare them to,' he writes of some electrical
experiments, 'a new song? or a Greek play?' In the spring of 1855 he
was fitting out the s.s. Elba, at Birkenhead, for his first telegraph
cruise. It appears that in 1855 Mr. Henry Brett attempted to lay a
cable across the Mediterranean between Cape Spartivento, in the south
of Sardinia, and a point near Bona, on the coast of Algeria. It was
a gutta-percha cable of six wires or conductors, and manufactured by
Messrs. Glass & Elliott, of Greenwich--a firm which afterwards combined
with the Gutta-Percha Company, and became the existing Telegraph
Construction and Maintenance Company. Mr. Brett laid the cable from the
Result, a sailing ship in tow, instead of a more manageable steamer;
and, meeting with 600 fathoms of water when twenty-five miles from land,
the cable ran out so fast that a tangled skein came up out of the hold,
and the line had to be severed. Having only 150 miles on board to span
the whole distance of 140 miles, he grappled the lost cable near the
shore, raised it, and 'under-run' or passed it over the ship, for some
twenty miles, then cut it, leaving the seaward end on the bottom. He
then spliced the ship's cable to the shoreward end and resumed his
paying-out; but after seventy miles in all were laid, another rapid rush
of cable took place, and Mr. Brett was obliged to cut and abandon the
line.

Another attempt was made the fo