And now the great inventor had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. In 1790 he had an interview with the King, who asked about his engines. But he had not landed at the topmost round of the ladder without much painful climbing and many weary steps. His life had been all through shadowed by ill-health, and an anxious, worrying mind that refused to be calm. He had a shrinking distaste to business, and a fearful habit of looking on the dark side of things. Often would he have sunk in depression and despair had it not been for his cheery partner. It was only in the late years of his life that he came to know anything like peace. His mind all along had been too active for his body. But though as an old man he retired from public life and from business, he could not altogether retire from invention. He invented a letter-copying machine, and one for copying statuary. In his old age he lived very quietly in his comfortable house near Birmingham, furnishing what he called his Garret, a room where he might be alone and still invent, don again, as in boyhood, the leather apron, cook his own food, and ponder anew the details of those wonderful inventions he had given to the world. Friends admitted there found "the great Mr. Watt" simple, modest, careless of display--much as he had been as a boy--his voice low and kindly, with still its broad, homely Scottish accent. The world would have liked to draw him from his seclusion, to caress him, to make much of him. It offered him a baronetcy, but his simple tastes lay not at all in the direction of such honours, and he refused it. In 1819, when he was eighty-three, the end came. "I feel," said the great man with a calm in strange contrast to the fearfulness and timidity that had accompanied him through life, "I feel that I am now come to my last illness." He passed away quietly and without suffering. They buried him in Handsworth Church--near to his partner, Boulton--and erected an imposing statue in Westminster Abbey, and beneath it Lord Brougham wrote his famous epitaph. To us his life has much of pathos. Men have called him "the greatest inventor in all ages," "the most extraordinary man that the world has ever seen," but the long years of struggle and labour and waiting, the weakness of body and the oft depression of spirit, are to us not a little sad, specially when we remember how patiently he endured, how uncomplainingly he suffered, that we might profit, that he might, as Lord Brougham has it, "increase the power of man." Splendid Books for Boys. By GORDON STABLES, M.D., R.N. Large Crown 8vo, Bevelled Boards, Gilt Edges, with Illustrations. _FIVE SHILLINGS each._ IN SHIPS OF STEEL. A Story of the Navy of To-Day. "A lively tale of the Navy of to-day, by that popular writer."--_The Guardian._ "We say a great deal when we say it is quite up to the Author's usual level of exciting story telling."--_The British Weekly._ FOR CROSS OR CRESCENT.