arly age he had
disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker
when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the
impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had
given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got
curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her,
which was considerable. His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an
early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics. An apprenticeship
of six years at the bench would have made an educated workman of him: as
it was, he pottered at every mechanical pursuit as a gentleman amateur
in a laboratory and workshop which he had got built for himself in his
park. In this magazine of toys--for such it virtually was at first--he
satisfied his itchings to play with tools and machines. He was no
sportsman; but if he saw in a shop window the most trumpery patent
improvement in a breechloader, he would go in and buy it; and as to a
new repeating rifle or liquefied gas gun, he would travel to St.
Petersburg to see it. He wrote very little; but he had sixteen different
typewriters, each guaranteed perfect by an American agent, who had also
pledged himself that the other fifteen were miserable impostures. A
really ingenious bicycle or tricycle always found in him a ready
purchaser; and he had patented a roller skate and a railway brake. When
the electric chair for dental operations was invented, he sacrificed a
tooth to satisfy his curiosity as to its operation. He could not play
brass instruments to any musical purpose; but his collection of double
slide trombones, bombardons with patent compensating pistons, comma
trumpets, and the like, would have equipped a small military band;
whilst his newly tempered harmonium with fifty-three notes to each
octave, and his pianos with simplified keyboards that nobody could play
on, were the despair of all musical amateurs who came to stay at Towers
Cottage, as his place was called. He would buy the most expensive and
elaborate lathe, and spend a month trying to make a true billiard ball
at it. At the end of that time he would have to send for a professional
hand, who would cornet the ball with apparently miraculous skill in a
few seconds. He got on better with chemistry and photography; but at
last he settled down to electrical engineering, and, giving up the idea
of doing everything with his own half-trained hand, kept a skilled man
always in