Mr. Napier erected a princely mansion on the Gareloch, named Shandon House, where his declining years were spent in retirement, but in the exercise of unbounded hospitality, as the writer can testify from his personal experience. Shandon House came to be like a museum containing a rare collection of pictures and antiquities from almost all parts of the world. Among his curios none was more highly prized than his mother’s spinning-wheel, and the painting that he valued the most was the portrait of his wife plying the same old-fashioned spinning-wheel, with which she had been familiar from girlhood. Does it not seem like the “irony of fate,” and a melancholy commentary on the transitory nature of everything mundane, that this marvellous accumulation of articles of _virtu_ was, shortly after Mr. Napier’s death, sold by public auction to the highest bidder, and that his palatial residence passed into the hands of a hydropathic company? Having said so much about the Cunard Line, there is no need to dwell at similar length upon any of the other transatlantic lines of steamers. The history of the Cunard Line is the history of Atlantic steam navigation. It commenced at a time when steam power had only been used as an auxiliary to sails, but when that order of affairs was soon to be reversed. The intervening years have witnessed the transition from wooden ships to iron, and from iron to steel; from the paddle-wheel to the single screw-propeller, and then to the twin-screw; from the simple side-lever engines to the compound, and from the compound to the triple and quadruple expansion engines of the present time. These successive changes, common to all the other important lines of ocean steamers, have resulted in greatly increased speed with economy of fuel. But no one at all conversant with the subject supposes that the limit in either of these directions has been reached. Her Majesty’s torpedo boats can easily reel off their thirty knots an hour; why not an express steamer?