Besides being an artist, Winstanley distinguished himself in the science of mechanics, though the particular branch of that science in which he seems to have laboured was rather of the order to astonish than to yield profitable scientific result. His house and garden at Littlebury bristled with mechanical contrivances of every description. If you chanced to tread upon a particular board in the passage, forthwith a door at the end of it flew open, and out sprang a skeleton and stood before you; as you sat yourself comfortably on a seat in the summer-house, before which was a duck-pond, the seat on which you sat was promptly swung round into the centre of the pond. In London he exhibited some of his contrivances with considerable monetary profit, and his moving wax-works held their own at Hyde Park Corner till 1709. Whatever wealth he possessed came to him either by some of the means described, or by inheritance. Jean Ingelow’s sprightly poem about the Eddystone lighthouse, beginning,— ‘Winstanley’s deed, you kindly folk, With it I fill my lay; And a nobler man ne’er walked the world, Let his name be what it may,’ tells how the ‘lovely ladies’ flocked to his London shop, where he followed the trade of a mercer, and anxiously inquired after the arrival of his homeward-bound ships, bringing the fabrics in which they yearned to clothe themselves; but the poet here follows an error into which many writers have fallen. There is no evidence that Henry Winstanley was a mercer; so that, whatever circumstances determined him to put a lighthouse on the Eddystone, it was not the loss of one of his own ships with a costly cargo of rich novelties in stuffs from abroad! Rudyerd, the architect of the _second_ Eddystone lighthouse, _was_ a mercer, whose shop was on Ludgate Hill—hence probably the mistake arising from a confusion of the two men. So much for the personal particulars connected with Henry Winstanley; in the next chapter we will resume the history of the actual construction of the Eddystone lighthouse, about which we have much more definite information. CHAPTER XII THE FIRST EDDYSTONE