Once, when Brindley was demonstrating to a committee of the House of Commons the superior reliableness and convenience of equable canals as compared with rivers, liable to every mischance of flood and drought, he was asked by a member, "What, then, he took to be the use of navigable rivers?" and replied, "To make canal navigations, to be sure!" From the Grand Trunk, other canals branched, and yet others were laid out by Brindley before he died. He found time when at the age of fifty to marry a girl of nineteen, and the house then falling vacant on the estate of Turnhurst, of which he had, for the sake of its minerals, bought a fourth share, and by that time had a colliery at work, he took his wife home as the mistress of that old, roomy dwelling. He was receiving better pay then as the engineer of the Grand Trunk Canal, and his new home was conveniently near to the workings of its great Harecastle Tunnel, into which he and his partners sent a short branch canal—of a mile and a half long—from their coal mine, which was only a few fields distant from his house.
Water, that made his greatness, was at last the death of Brindley. He got drenched one day while surveying a canal, went about in his wet clothes, and when he went to bed at the inn was put between damp sheets. This produced the illness of which he died, at the age of fifty-six. It was not the first time that he had taken to his bed. Scarcely able to read, and if he could have read, engaged on work so new that no book precedents could have [{245}] helped him, whenever Brindley had some difficulty to overcome that seemed for a time insuperable, he went to bed upon it, and is known to have stopped in bed two or three days, till he had quietly thought it all over, and worked his way to the solution. It is said that when he lay on his death-bed some eager canal undertakers urged to see him and seek from him the solution of a problem. They had met with a serious difficulty in the course of their canal, and must see Mr. Brindley and get his advice. They were admitted, and told him how at a certain place they had labored in vain to prevent their canal from leaking. "Then puddle it," murmured Brindley. "Sir, but we have puddled it." "Then"—and they were almost his last words in life—"puddle it again—and again." As he had wisely invested his savings in Grand Trunk shares, they and his share in the colliery enabled him to leave ample provision for his widow and two daughters.
As for the canal system that he established, it has not been made obsolete by its strong younger brother, the railway system. The duke's canal is as busy as ever. Not less than twenty million tons of traffic are at this date carried yearly upon the canals of England alone, and this quantity is steadily increasing.
We have taken the facts in this account of Brindley, from a delightful popular edition of that part of Mr. Smiles's Lives of the Engineers which tells of him and of the earlier water engineers. Of Mr. Smiles's Lives of George and Robert Stephenson there is a popular edition as a companion volume, and therein all may read, worthily told, the tale of the foundation and of the chief triumphs of that new form of engineering which dealt with water, not by the riverful, but by the bucketful, and made a few buckets of water strong as a river to sweep men and their goods and their cattle in a mighty torrent from one corner of the country to another.
From Chambers's Journal.
A LIE.
A thistle grew in a sluggard's croft,
Rough and rank with a thorny growth,
With its spotted leaves, and its purple flowers
(Blossoms of Sin, and bloom of Sloth);
Slowly it ripened its baneful seeds,
And away they went in swift gray showers.
But every seed was cobweb winged,
And they spread o'er a hundred miles of land.
'Tis centuries now since they first took flight,
In that careless, gay, and mischievous band,
Yet still they are blooming and ripening fast,
And spreading their evil by day and night.