[Picture: Conway Bridge.—Floating the First Tube] [Picture: View in Tapton Gardens] CHAPTER XVIII. GEORGE STEPHENSON’S CLOSING YEARS—ILLNESS AND DEATH. In describing the completion of the series of great works detailed in the preceding chapter, we have somewhat anticipated the closing years of George Stephenson’s life. He could not fail to take an anxious interest in the success of his son’s designs, and he accordingly paid many visits to Conway and to Menai, during the progress of the works. He was present on the occasion of the floating and raising of the first Conway tube, and there witnessed a clear proof of the soundness of Robert’s judgment as to the efficiency and strength of the tubular bridge, of which he had at first expressed some doubts; but before the like test could be applied at the Britannia Bridge, George Stephenson’s mortal anxieties were at an end, for he had then ceased from all his labours. Towards the close of his life, George Stephenson almost entirely withdrew from the active pursuit of his profession; he devoted himself chiefly to his extensive collieries and lime-works, taking a local interest only in such projected railways as were calculated to open up new markets for their products. At home he lived the life of a country gentleman, enjoying his garden and grounds, and indulging his love of nature, which, through all his busy life, had never left him. It was not until the year 1845 that he took an active interest in horticultural pursuits. Then he began to build new melon-houses, pineries, and vineries, of great extent; and he now seemed as eager to excel all other growers of exotic plants in his neighbourhood, as he had been to surpass the villagers of Killingworth in the production of gigantic cabbages and cauliflowers some thirty years before. He had a pine-house built 68 feet in length and a pinery 140 feet. Workmen were constantly employed in enlarging them, until at length he had no fewer than ten glass forcing-houses, heated with hot water, which he was one of the first in that neighbourhood to make use of for such a purpose. He did not take so much pleasure in flowers as in fruits. At one of the county agricultural meetings, he said that he intended yet to grow pineapples at Tapton as big as pumpkins. The only man to whom he would “knock under” was his friend Paxton, the gardener to the Duke of Devonshire; and he was so old in the service, and so skilful, that he could scarcely hope to beat him. Yet his “Queen” pines did take the first prize at a competition with the Duke,—though this was not until shortly after his death, when the plants had become more fully grown. His grapes also took the first prize at Rotherham, at a competition open to all England. He was extremely successful in producing melons, having invented a method of suspending them in baskets of wire gauze, which, by relieving the stalk from tension, allowed nutrition to proceed more