When I came to New York years afterward I was astonished to notice that there were a half-dozen men around every coal-cart, unloading the coal. I thought of the ox-cart, the peg, and the hopper, which I had used thirty years before. I suggested the use of a device for letting the coal run from the cart into the cellar, but could not get any one to listen to the proposition. Now, years after my suggestion, all of these carts in New York and other large cities of America have small scoops running from the cart to the coal-hole, and a single man unloads the cart by winding a windlass and lifting the front end of the wagon. In London they still keep up the old, clumsy, and expensive method of unloading with sacks. The English are in some things where we were a century ago. Once in London I was astonished to see a man, after writing something with a lead-pencil, search through his pockets for a piece of india-rubber with which to erase an error. He had lost it, and could only smudge the paper by marking out what he had written. I said to him: "Why don't you attach the rubber to the pencil? Then you couldn't lose it." He jumped at my suggestion, took out a patent for the rubber attachment to pencils, and made money. When Rowland Hill, the great English postal reformer, introduced penny-postage into England, he found it necessary to employ many girls to clip off the stamps from great sheets. I took a sheet of paper to him, and showed him how easy it would be by perforation to tear off the stamps as needed. He adopted my idea; and now a single machine does the whole work. I noticed one day in England a lot of "flunkeys" rushing up to the carriages of titled ladies and busying themselves adjusting steps, which were separate from the carriage, and had been taken along with great inconvenience. I said to myself, why not have the steps attached? and I spoke about the idea to others. It was taken up, and carried out. Now every carriage has steps attached as a part of the structure. In '50, I was with James McHenry in Liverpool, and in trying to pour some ink from a bottle into the ink-well, the bottle was upset, and the ink spilled all over the desk. This was because too much ink came from the mouth. "Give the bottle a nose, like a milk pitcher," I said; "then you can pour the ink into the well easily." Holden, of Liverpool, took up the idea, and patented it, and made a fortune out of it. CHAPTER IX MY COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE--RETURN TO LIVERPOOL 1850-1852