His own parents and those of his wife had come to live in Edinburgh; but he lost them all within ten months of each other. Jenkin had showed great devotion to them in their illnesses, and was worn out with grief and watching. His telpherage, too, had given him considerable anxiety to perfect; and his mother's illness, which affected her mind, had caused himself to fear. He was meditating a holiday to Italy with his wife in order to recuperate, and had a trifling operation performed on his foot, which resulted, it is believed, in blood poisoning. There seemed to be no danger, and his wife was reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when his intellect began to wander. It is doubtful whether he regained his senses before he died, on June 12, 1885. At one period of his life Jenkin was a Freethinker, holding, as Mr. Stevenson says, all dogmas as 'mere blind struggles to express the inexpressible.' Nevertheless, as time went on he came back to a belief in Christianity. 'The longer I live,' he wrote, 'the more convinced I become of a direct care by God--which is reasonably impossible--but there it is.' In his last year he took the Communion. CHAPTER VII. JOHANN PHILIPP REIS. Johann Philipp Reis, the first inventor of an electric telephone, was born on January 7, 1834, at the little town of Gelnhausen, in Cassel, where his father was a master baker and petty farmer. The boy lost his mother during his infancy, and was brought up by his paternal grandmother, a well-read, intelligent woman, of a religious turn. While his father taught him to observe the material world, his grandmother opened his mind to the Unseen. At the age of six he was sent to the common school of the town, where his talents attracted the notice of his instructors, who advised his father to extend his education at a higher college. Mr. Reis died before his son was ten years old; but his grandmother and guardians afterwards placed him at Garnier's Institute, in Friedrichsdorf, where he showed a taste for languages, and acquired both French and English, as well as a stock of miscellaneous information from the library. At the end of his fourteenth year he passed to Hassel's Institute, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he picked up Latin and Italian. A love of science now began to show itself, and his guardians were recommended to send him to the Polytechnic School of Carlsruhe; but one of them, his uncle, wished him to become a merchant, and on March 1, 1850, Reis was apprenticed to the colour trade in the establishment of Mr. J. F Beyerbach, of Frankfort, against his own will. He told his uncle that he would learn the business chosen for him, but should continue his proper studies by-and-by.