Sheffield without calling to see his old friend Levesley, while the latter spoke of his early and later life with respect and commendation, especially in his domestic relations. It is pleasing to review a life of such humble beginnings, culminating in opulence and usefulness like that of the late Joseph Gillott, of Birmingham; nor is it less to name in connection therewith, as an early experimenter in steel pen making, our worthy townsman, William Levesley, to whose ingenious improvement every writer is so much indebted, and of whose verbal communication to me the foregoing is an imperfect sketch." Now, in this statement, there are some dales given, but others are omitted, and that is a very unfortunate circumstance. Levesley told the writer of the article in the _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_ that he made use of the fly press for working tools for shaping, bending, and slitting pens. If the writer had only given the date of this it would have been a valuable contribution toward a history of the invention. The claim of Levesley to having invented the process of grinding pens and teaching Gillott seems, to say the least, curious, because the latter was a Sheffield grinder, and the idea would certainly be quite as likely to occur to Gillott as Levesley. Besides, why did Levesley communicate the idea to Gillott in preference to Skinner, with whom he had business relations? The statement that Gillott had fifty girls employed when Levesley* called upon him on his next visit to Birmingham looks like a mistake. Fifty girls would grind on an average seven thousand gross of pens in a week, and as this correspondence appears to refer to the early part of Gillott's career, it is scarcely possible that such a number of pens were produced weekly at that period. Besides, as a matter of fact, boys were, in the first instance, employed to grind pens. * Mr. Sam: Timmins says, "that Levesley told him that Gillott started in Birmingham as a jobbing cutler; that Mitchell had the secret of pen making; that Mitchell sent for Gillott to come to Birmingham, and that he (J.G.) first lived at the top of Water Street; that Gillott began to make pens in Bread Street; that Perry made pens from flattened steel wire, the breadth of the pen (the steel was 3s. 6d. per lb., and drawn at Old Ford); that he had seen cross grinding (at Gillott's) in Newhall Street, and fifty women at work; and that pens had double slits and cut holes. Levesley certainly knew all the Gillott family, personally, in Sheffield, and he (S. T.) had a long interview with him shortly before his death, when he mentioned all the facts given here." Herr Ignaz Nagel, in his "Report on Writing, Drawing, and Painters' Requisites," at the Vienna Exhibition, 1873, says: