Navigators," and as the Duke of Bridgewater was
a Whig, Brindley had to enter in his note-book
that "the Toores" (Tories) "mad had" (made
head) " agane ye Duk." But at last his entry
was
         "ad a grate Division of 127 fort Duk
                                               98 nos
                                              ———
                               for t° Duk 29 Me Jorete,"
and the Duke's cause prospered during the rest
of the contest.

Brindley bought a new suit of clothes to
grace his part as principal engineering witness
for the canal, and having upset his mind for some
days by going to see Garrick play Richard the
Third (wherefore he declared against all further
indulgence in that sort of excitement), he went
to the committee-room duly provided with a bit
of chalk in his pocket, and made good the saying
that originated from his clear way of showing
what he meant upon the floor of the committee-
room, that "Brindley and chalk would go
through the world." When asked to produce
a drawing of a proposed bridge, he said he had
none, but could immediately get a model.
Whereupon he went out and bought a large
cheese, which he brought into the committee-
room and cut into two equal parts, saying,
"Here is my model." The two halves of the
cheese represented the two arches of his bridge,
the rest of the work connected with them he
built with paper, with books, or with whatever
he found ready to hand. Once when he had
repeatedly talked about " puddling," some of
the members wished to know what puddling
was. Brindley sent out for a lump of clay,
hollowed it into a trough, poured water in, and
showed that it leaked out. Then he worked up
the clay with water, going through the process
of puddling in miniature, again made a trough
of the puddled clay, filled it with water, and
showed that it was water-tight. "Thus it is,"
he said, "that I form a water-tight trunk to
carry water over rivers and valleys, wherever
they cross the path of the canal."

And so the battle was fought, and the canal
works completed at a total cost of two hundred
and twenty thousand pounds, of which Brindley
was content to take as his share a rate of pay
below that of an ordinary mechanic at the
present day. The canal yielded an income which
eventually reached eighty thousand pounds a
year; but three and sixpence a day, and for a
greater part of the time half-a-crown a day, was
the salary of the man of genius by whom it was
planned and executed. Yet Brindley was then
able to get a guinea a day for services to others,
though from the Duke ot Bridgewater he never
took more than a guinea a week, and had not
always that. The duke was investing all the
money he could raise, and sometimes at his wits'
end for means to go on with the work. Brindley
gave his soul to the work for its own sake, and
if he had a few pence to buy himself his dinner
with—one day he enters only "ating and
drinking 6d." he could live content with
having added not a straw's weight of impediment
to the great enterprise he was bent with
all the force of his great genius upon achieving.
It gave him the advantage, also, of being able,
as was most convenient, to treat with the duke
on equal terms. He was invited as a canal
maker to Hesse by offers of any payment he
chose to demand, but stuck to the duke, who is
said even to have been in debt to him for travelling
and other expenses, which he had left unpaid
with the answer, "I am much more distressed
for money than you; however, as soon as I can
recover myself, your services shall not go
unrewarded." After Brindley's sudden death his
widow applied in vain for sums which she said
were due to her late husband.

The Staffordshire Grand Trunk Canal, Brindley's
other great work, started from the duke's
canal near Runcorn, passed through the
saltmaking districts of Cheshire and the Pottery
district, to unite the Severn with the Mersey by
one hundred and forty miles of water-way. This
canal went through five tunnels, one of them,
that at Harecastle, being nearly three thousand
yards long, a feature in the scheme accounted
by many to be as preposterous as they had
called his former "castle in the air." The
work was done; bringing with it traffic,
population, and prosperity into many half-savage
midland districts. It gave comfort and ample
employment in the Pottery district, while trebling
the numbers of those whom it converted from a
half-employed and ill-paid set of savages into a
thriving community.

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 at 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 helped him,