ear. As he was engaged to be married, he chose the office,
and went home rejoicing, feeling that he was a made man. Nor did he long
delay to communicate the joyful news to the young lady. To her also he
explained his invention, dwelling upon the fact that a five-pound stamp
a hundred years old could be taken off a document and used a second
time.

"Yes," said she, "I understand that; but, surely, if all stamps had a
DATE put upon them they could not at a future time be used again without
detection."

The inventor was startled. He had never thought of an expedient so
simple and so obvious. A lover could not but be pleased at such
ingenuity in his affianced bride; but it spoiled his invention! His
perforated stamp did not allow of the insertion of more than one date.
He succeeded in obviating this difficulty, but deemed it only fair to
communicate the new idea to the chief of the stamp office. The result
was that the government simply adopted the plan of putting a date upon
all the stamps afterwards issued, and discarded Bessemer's fine scheme
of perforation, which would have involved an expensive and troublesome
change of machinery and methods. But the worst of it was that the
inventor lost his office, since his services were not needed. Nor did he
ever receive compensation for the service rendered.

Thus it was that a young lady changed the stamp system of her country,
and ruined her lover's chances of getting a good office. She rendered
him, however, and rendered the world, a much greater service in throwing
him upon his own resources. They were married soon after, and Mrs.
Bessemer is still living to tell how she married and made her husband's
fortune.

Twenty years passed, with the varied fortune which young men of energy
and talent often experience in this troublesome world. We find him then
experimenting in the conversion of iron into steel. The experiments were
laborious as well as costly, since his idea was to convert at one
operation many tons' weight of iron into steel, and in a few minutes. As
iron ore contains carbon, he conceived the possibility of making that
carbon unite with the iron during the very process of smelting. For
nearly two years he was building furnaces and pulling them down again,
spending money and toil with just enough success to lure him on to spend
more money and toil; experimenting sometimes with ten pounds of iron
ore, and sometimes with several hundredweight. His efforts were at
l