The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once succeeded.  Mr. Smith’s two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith.  It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.  But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the three women on the other, was too complete to have been the result of influence alone.  Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each side.  And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met with common ambitions, and a common bent, to the practice of that which had not so long before acquired the name of civil engineering.

For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and influential, was then a thing of yesterday.  My grandfather had an anecdote of Smeaton, probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin, their common friend.  Smeaton was asked by the Duke of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a professional purpose.  He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough travelling.  ’You can recommend some other fit person?’ asked the Duke.  ‘No,’ said Smeaton, ‘I’m sorry I can’t.’  ‘What!’ cried the Duke, ’a profession with only one man in it!  Pray, who taught you?’ ‘Why,’ said Smeaton, ’I believe I may say I was self-taught, an’t please your grace.’  Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith’s third marriage, was yet living; and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the instrument-maker’s, the other was beginning to enter it by the way of his trade.  The engineer of to-day is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables and formulae to the value of folios full have been calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the pioneers.  In the eighteenth century the field was largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and adventures.  It was not a science then—­it was a living art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between the hands of its practitioners.

The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and stepson.  It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than the interest of that employment mastered him.  The vacant stage on which he was to act, and where all had yet to be created—­the greatness of the difficulties, the smallness of the