Furnival returned to England and set up his salt-works at Wharton, where he “produced some of the finest rock-salt in the kingdom.” The old proprietors decided that no sacrifice was too great that would have the effect of crushing this competitor. They lowered the price of rock-salt 50 per cent., and kept manufactured salt so low that every establishment was worked at a loss. A meeting of proprietors, convened to consider the situation, resolved that while “they deeply lamented the low price of salt, they considered, at the same time, that it would not be prudent to raise the price until Mr. Furnival was disposed of.” The salt manufacturers admitted, in a circular published in 1829, that this cutting-out operation had, in four and a half years, involved the trade in a loss of £282,194 14s., but it had the effect of frightening away Furnival’s financial supporters, and landed him in further misfortunes. [Illustration: WORKING IN DANGEROUS GROUND AFTER SUBSIDENCE, DUNKIRK LAKE, NORTHWICH] In 1826, Furnival had entered into a contract with a Peter Bouvain to erect a salt-works in the Isle of Rhé, but the month that was required to prove the capabilities of the patent plant was sufficient to demonstrate the commercial worthlessness of the Frenchman, and Furnival cut his loss and returned to England. Bouvain brought a claim against him for the loss of prospective profits and obtained a judgment for £8,000, against which Furnival appealed to the Court of Cassation in Paris. Before the case was heard, Furnival was inveigled to the Netherlands by a forged invitation, purporting to come from a wealthy Belgian salt-refiner, driven over the frontier, arrested in France at the suit of Bouvain, and thrown into gaol. Finding that legal redress was unobtainable, Furnival escaped from prison after four months’ incarceration, and in January, 1830, was again in Cheshire. He was engaged in a bitter and protracted altercation with his two sets of tenants in the Wharton salt-works in August, 1832, when he was arrested for the non-payment of his debt of £8,180 to Bouvain, and lodged in Horsemonger Lane Gaol. In January, 1833, he brought an action for perjury against Bouvain, who fled to France to escape the warrant that was issued for his arrest, but this moral victory brought Furnival neither release nor amelioration of his lot, and he found himself “foully and unjustly charged by a band of conspirators, defeated in every attempt to obtain justice, and left without a hope or prospect of being able to vindicate himself, or extricate himself from a confinement more close than that awarded to a felon.” The end of Furnival need not occupy us; he came into the salt trade in 1822 with a sufficiency of financial backing, an unusual stock of confidence and energy, and a patent which “created a sensation through the whole salt trade”; we take our leave of him eleven years later in a debtors’ gaol--a victim to the methods which the Cheshire salt proprietors