we sat down together by the fire. I heard
of a most useful life--a successful career, conceived and carried out by
the man who related it. Whatever success has fallen to Sir Robert
Rawlinson's lot has been honestly laboured for. Sir Robert to-day is a
real example, a personified definition of--Industry. He refers to it all
very quietly--there is not a tittle of over-estimated powers about his
speech. He started life with a purpose--he has lived it with a will.
Born at Bristol on the 28th February, 1810--his father, Thomas
Rawlinson, of Chorley, Lancashire, was a mason and builder, his mother a
Devonshire woman. Sir Robert barely went to school--he frankly declares
that his education only cost three-halfpence a week. He worked at his
father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a
stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a
navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a
practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer--a profession
on which his heart was set.

"When I was one-and-twenty," he said, as he contemplatively turned over
the past pages of his life in his mind, "I was residing at Liverpool and
entered the Dock office under Jesse Hartley, the greatest dock engineer
the world has seen. I remained there for five years, for the last three
of which I was Hartley's confidential draughtsman and adviser. Then I
went on to the London and Birmingham Railway, the Blisworth contract,
under Robert Stephenson. Stephenson was remarkably considerate and
indeed a gentleman, and treated me with almost brotherly kindness. I was
in charge of the masonry. The railway was in a cutting about two miles
long and sixty feet deep through rock, with an intervening bed of clay,
which had to be cut out and then filled in with masonry. I was then
twenty-six."

Mr. Rawlinson completed the work successfully. At the age of thirty, he
once more went to Liverpool, filling the post of Assistant Surveyor to
the Corporation. He remained there for two and a half years, when, on
the recommendation of his first employer--Jesse Hartley--he was
appointed engineer to the celebrated Bridgwater Canal. Then I listened
to the story of how he came to design and complete the wonderful hollow
brick ceiling over St. George's Hall, Liverpool; the lightest work of
its kind, probably, in the world.

"Whilst I was in Liverpool," Sir Robert said, "I met young Harvey
Lonsdale Elmes, the architect