Trevithick was now verging upon sixty years of age, and found that he had to begin life anew. His first endeavour was to form a company to work his mines in Costa Rica, but neither he nor his friend Gerard could succeed in doing this either in England, in France, or in Holland; and, if the report be true that he refused a cheque for £8,000 for his share in the mine-grants, he must have lived to repent it bitterly. However, his busy brain was soon at work again with inventions. First an iron ship and a gun with friction-slides; then a recoil gun-carriage, in which he utilized the recoil somewhat after the manner since so effectually accomplished by Moncrieff; then we find him suggesting a mode of making ice by steam. Next he invents a chain-and-ball pump for draining the Dutch marshes; and, soon after, we hear of his being employed by the Government of that country to examine into sundry important engineering works which they had in hand, whilst poor Trevithick had to borrow £2 from a friend to enable him to get over to Holland for the purpose. It may be mentioned, to show what a good-natured fellow he was, that he at once gave 5s. out of this to a poor neighbour who had had the misfortune to lose his pig. During a great part of this period of his life Trevithick was at Hayle Foundry, engaged in the construction of the great draining engines for Holland; but he, nevertheless, found time for further inventions, notably for applying tubular boilers, a superheating system, and surface-condensers to marine engines, to say nothing of his proposals to make the same water act over and over again by alternate expansion and contraction, so as to avoid the objectionable necessity for using salt water in the boilers. By his method marine engines occupied only half their former space; were half the weight; and consumed half the fuel that they formerly did: and it would scarcely be too much to say that his genius rendered the first voyage across the Atlantic practicable. In connexion with this subject, he took out his eighth and last patent in 1832. Perhaps his latest project was as original--not to say Utopian--as any that even his fertile brain ever conceived. It was to erect a perforated, gilt, cast-iron column, 1,000 feet high, to commemorate the passing of the Reform Bill. One novel feature in it was the air-elevator, which worked in a tube in the centre of the column, and shot the traveller from the base to the summit, on arriving at which he was to secure a glorious bird's-eye view of London.