the unbroken silence with which the whole operation had been accompanied.” {335} By midnight all the pontoons had been got clear of the tube, which now hung suspended over the waters of the Strait by its two ends, which rested upon the edges cut in the rock for the purpose at the base of the Britannia and Anglesey towers respectively, up which the tube had now to be lifted by hydraulic power to its permanent place near the summit. The accuracy with which the gigantic beam had been constructed may be inferred from the fact that, after passing into its place, a clear space remained between the iron plating and the rock outside of it of only about three-quarters of an inch! Mr. Stephenson’s anxiety was, of course, very great up to the time of performing this trying operation. When he had got the first tube floated at Conway, and saw all safe, he said to Captain Moorsom, “Now I shall go to bed.” But the Britannia Bridge was a still more difficult enterprise, and cost him many a sleepless night. Afterwards describing his feelings to his friend Mr. Gooch, he said: “It was a most anxious and harassing time with me. Often at night I would lie tossing about, seeking sleep in vain. The tubes filled my head. I went to bed with them and got up with them. In the grey of the morning, when I looked across the Square, {336} it seemed an immense distance across to the houses on the opposite side. It was nearly the same length as the span of my tubular bridge!” When the first tube had been floated, a friend observed to him, “This great work has made you ten years older.” “I have not slept sound,” he replied, “for three weeks.” Sir F. Head, however relates, that when he revisited the spot on the following morning, he observed, sitting on a platform overlooking the suspended tube, a gentleman, reclining entirely by himself, smoking a cigar, and gazing, as if indolently, at the aërial gallery beneath him. It was the engineer himself, contemplating his new born child. He had strolled down from the neighbouring village, after his first sound and refreshing sleep for weeks, to behold in sunshine and solitude, that which during a weary period of gestation had been either mysteriously moving in his brain, or, like a vision—sometimes of good omen, and sometimes of evil—had, by night as well as by day, been flitting across his mind.