Many letters afterwards pass between the happy pair; but their course of true love runs very smoothly until all is made ready. At the beginning of September, we find Miss Woollatt coming down from London to Blackwell to be married. It would certainly have seemed more natural that she should be married from her father’s house, but that did not seem to be either possible or advisable under changed circumstances, as her father had married again, and the step-mother, as is often the case, seemed to stand rather in the way of the children being at home. We now, therefore, see Jedediah Strutt happily settled at Blackwell, apparently ready to remain steadfast to farming, and married to the excellent and most industrious woman of his affections. It must have been, however, about the time his first child, William, was born, that a change came over the scene, and that Jedediah’s strong taste for mechanics obliged him to think of other things besides his farm. His brother-in-law, William Woollatt, who had been assisting his father in the hosiery trade, and till the second marriage had been living at Findern, knowing Strutt’s bent for mechanics, desired his assistance in connection with an object which he had at heart, viz., the invention of a machine for making ribbed hose. It will be best and most fitting here to give Mr. Felkin’s account of this invention.[132] [132] _History of Machine-wrought Hosiery_, by W. Felkin, p. 88. “Mr. William Woollatt was at that time, 1750, a hosier in Derby. His attention was directed to the question of how these ribbed hose could be made, and he brought under the special attention of his brother-in-law, Mr. Jedediah Strutt, who, though an agriculturist, had he knew been from his youth engaged in mechanical pursuits as an occupation of his mind and hands during his leisure time. The reference thus made proved to be a most successful one. The important results could not have been at first anticipated, nor even during the lifetime of Mr. Strutt were they fully understood. But they have been such as to have given him a just prominence amongst the inventors of that age, and to require the more extended personal account about to be given. The very simplicity of the plan he devised and of the mode of its application to the machine of Lee 170 years after its invention added to the fact that no historian of the trade wrote during the next fifty years preclude any very minute details of the obstacles he encountered. Such an account now would be very interesting, if it had been forthcoming. Great difficulties there must have been, for the constructive powers of mechanics in the stocking trade had not a hundred years ago been employed as they have been since; mainly as the effect of this effort of Strutt’s genius.... It was now that he, by Mr. Woollatt’s representations of the difficulty and importance of the matter then occupying the frame-work knitting world, was induced