ed to. Under their care
this grew and grew, until it became a Mechanics' Institute, or,
rather, a department of science and art, which at the present day
has an intimate connection with South Kensington. Some hundred
prizes are here annually distributed to the numerous students, both
male and female, who can here obtain the very best instruction, at
the very smallest cost, in almost every branch of learning, from
sewing to shorthand, from freehand drawing to algebra and conic
sections. On one occasion, while distributing the prizes to the
successful competitors, Sir Daniel Gooch laid bare some of his early
struggles as an incentive to the youth around him. He admitted that
there was a time, and a dark hour, when he all but gave up hopes of
ultimate success, when it seemed that the dearest wish of his heart
must for ever go without fulfilment. In this desponding mood he was
slowly crossing a bridge in London, when he observed an inscription
upon the parapet--_Nil Desperandum_ (Never despair). How he took
heart at this as an omen, and went forth and persevered till----The
speaker did not complete the sentence, but all the world knows what
ultimately happened, and remembers the man who laid the first
Atlantic cable. The great lesson of perseverance, of patience, was
never drawn with better effect.

In the Eastern tales of magicians one reads of a town being found
one day where there was nothing but sand the day before. Here the
fable is fact, and the potent magician is Steam. Here is, perhaps,
the greatest temple that has ever been built to that great god of
our day. Taking little note of its immense extent, of the vast walls
which enclose it, like some fortress, of the tunnel which gives
entrance, and through which three thousand workmen pass four times a
day, let us enter at once and go straight to the manufacture of
those wheels and tires and axles of which we have heard so much
since the tragedy at Shipton. To look at a carriage-wheel, the iron
carriage-wheel, one would imagine that it was all one piece, that it
was stamped out at a blow, so little sign is there of a junction of
parts. The very contrary is the fact: the wheel is made of a large
number of pieces of iron welded together, and again and again welded
together, till at last it forms one solid homogeneous mass. The
first of these processes consists in the manufacture of the spokes,
which are made out of fine iron. The spoke is made in two pieces, at
two dif