The autumn was withering into winter, the yellow leaves were swirling to the ground with every little breath of wind, and the boughs were beginning to show forth bare and grim, when the little boat was launched upon the bosom of Dalswinton Loch. At length all the preparations were finished, and on the 14th November Mr. Miller had the delight of seeing the vessel gliding over the mimic waves of the lake at the rate of five miles an hour. The company on board the boat on that memorable occasion were--Mr. Miller himself, of course, nervous with pleasure and exultation; Taylor, the tutor; Alexander Nasmyth (the well-known landscape painter, and father of the man who, in the next generation, was to invent the wonderful steam-hammer, that knocks masses of iron about like putty, and can yet so moderate its force as to crack a nut without bruising the kernel); a brisk stripling with strongly marked features, by name Harry Brougham, afterwards to be Lord Chancellor of England, and perhaps the most many-sided genius of his time; and--last and greatest of the group--there was one of Mr. Miller's tenants, the farmer of Ellisland,--Robert Burns, the great bard of Scotland, enjoying to the full, no doubt, the novelty of the expedition, but, we must suppose, unconscious of its import and grand future consequences, since he has accorded it no commemorative verse. "Many a time," says Mr. James Nasmyth, son of the distinguished painter, "I have heard my father describe the delight which this first and successful essay at steam navigation yielded the party in question. I only wish Burns had immortalized it in fit, clinking rhyme, for, indeed, it was a subject worthy of his highest muse." The experiment was next tried on a large scale with a canal boat, on the Forth and Clyde Canal, but one of the wheels broke. Not to be balked, Symington had stronger wheels made, and the next time the steam was put on, the vessel went off at the rate of seven miles an hour. The experiment was several times repeated with success. The vessel, however, was so slight, that many more trips would have knocked it to pieces; and it was therefore dismantled. The fitting up of these vessels, and the working of them, formed a heavy drain upon Mr. Miller's purse; and having laid satisfactory proof before the world that the thing could be done, he relinquished the enterprise, and left it to be worked out by others. Just then, however, no one came forward to fill his place; and for some years the idea slumbered.