himself in water by going to the other side for it."--"With
regard to spirits, Charles, I see very little occasion for it." These
abrupt apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience;
but they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.
There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away
from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff. "I fear,"
writes my grandfather, "you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry to
add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which
I have experienced, and which you will learn as you go on in business."
I wonder, was not Charles Peebles himself a case in point? Either death,
at least, or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service
in the Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for
any mention of his name--Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as
1839 my grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family: "I am
sorry you took the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies
quite out of my way to forward his views in the line of his profession
as a Draper."

III

A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
such matters. But my own design, which is to represent the man, would be
very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget that he
was, first of all and last of all, an engineer. His chief claim to the
style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane
of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances. But the great merit
of this engineer was not in the field of engines. He was above all
things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of
nature itself. A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be
constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel--these were
the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these
and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century,
like an artist, note-book in hand.

He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he
did so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so
doing offered the perfect type of his profession. The fact acquired
might never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world's huge
chain of processes was brought down to figures and placed at