talents that Crompton, unfortunately for himself, did not possess. In the result, the secret was given away for a miserable pittance, and not even patented. Factories were equipped with his invention, and manufacturers combined to subscribe, as an act of grace, a hundred guineas that should, multiplied a thousandfold, have been his by right. In 1812, Crompton found that the number of spindles worked on his principle totalled five millions. In that year a reward seemed almost within his grasp, for a vote of £20,000, in recognition of his services was proposed, and was to have been submitted to Parliament by Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister; but that very day, in the act of carrying a memorandum to that effect in his hand, Perceval was assassinated by Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, and the proposal was not renewed. But by the intervention of some friends a memorial to Parliament was prepared, which was signed by the principal manufacturers of the kingdom, with the result that the sum of £5,000 was granted to him. Let us here observe the exquisite humour of the thing. The “principal manufacturers” had become such, and had amassed great wealth by aid of Crompton’s mule, but they meanly went to Government, and thus taxed the whole nation for a sum themselves should have raised. With this sum Crompton established his sons in the bleaching business; but the establishment failed, and the inventor was again in straitened circumstances. A second subscription was raised, and a life annuity purchased for Crompton, producing about £63 per annum. He enjoyed it only two years, for he died in 1827, aged seventy-three, and was buried in Bolton parish churchyard. The last stroke of cynic fortune was not dealt until 1862, when the hapless inventor had been thirty-five years in his grave. Then the town of Bolton, whose manufacturers had, living, denied him a livelihood, set up a statue to the man who had made their town, and twenty other towns, great and prosperous. Among those present at the unveiling, and shrinking in his poverty from the robed and finely apparelled magnates, was Crompton’s surviving son, then aged seventy-two, and in the poorest circumstances. Palmerston eventually sent him a dole from the Royal Bounty Fund. [Sidenote: _RELICS OF CROMPTON_]