an apprentice, he had taught himself to write in
a clumsy half-illegible way—he never learnt to
spell—and when he had been thirteen years in
business, he would still charge an employer his
day's work at two shillings for cutting a big
tree, for a mill-shaft or for other use. When he
was called to exercise his skill at a distance
upon some machinery, he added a charge of
sixpence a day for extra expenses.

When the brothers John and Thomas Wedgwood,
potters in a small way, at the outset
of their famous career, desired to increase the
supply of flint powder, they called "the
Schemer" to their aid, and the success of the
flint-mills Brindley then erected brought him
business in the Potteries from that time forward.

About this time, also, a Manchester man was
being married to a young lady of mark in the
Potteries, and during the wedding festivities
conversation once turned on the cleverness of
the young millwright of Leek. The Manchester
man wondered whether he was clever
enough to get the water out of some hopelessly
drowned coal mines of his, and thought he should
like to see him. Brindley was sent for, told
the case and its hitherto insuperable
difficulties, went into a brown study, then suddenly
brightened up and told in what way he thought
that, without great expense, the difficulty might
be conquered. The gist of his plan was to use
the fall of the river Irwell that formed one
boundary of the estate, and pump the water
from the pits by means of the greater power of
the water in the river. His suggestion was
thought good, and, being set to work upon
this job, he drove a tunnel through six hundred
yards of solid rock, and by the tunnel brought
the river down upon the breast of an immense
water-wheel fixed in a chamber thirty feet below
the surface of the ground; the water, when it
had turned the wheel, was carried on into the
lower level of the Irwell. That wheel with
its pumps, working night and day, soon cleared
the drowned outworkings of the mine; and for
the invention and direction of this valuable
engineering work he seems only to have charged
his workman's wages of two shillings a day.

An engineer from London had been brought
down to superintend the building of a new
silk-mill at Congleton, and Brindley was
employed under him to make the water-wheel and
do the common work of his trade. The
engineer from London got his work into a mess,
and at last was obliged to confess his inability
to carry out his plan. "The Schemer" Brindley
was applied to by the perplexed proprietor.
Could he put the confusion straight? James
Brindley asked to see the plans, but the great
engineer refused to show them to a common
millwright. "Well, then," said Brindley to the
proprietor of the mill, "tell me exactly what you
want the machinery to do, and I will try to
contrive what will do it. But you must leave
me free to work in my own way." He was
told the results desired, and not only achieved
them, but achieved much more, adding new
contrivances which afterwards proved of the.
greatest value.

After this achievement, Brindley was
employed by the now prospering potters to build
flint-mills of more power upon a new plan of his
own. One of the largest was that built for Mr.
Baddely, of which work there is record in such
trade entries of his as "March 15. 1757. With
Mr. Badley to Matherso about a now" (new)
"flint mill upon a windey day 1 day 3s. 6d.
March 19 draing a plann 1 day 2s. 6d. March 23
draing a plann and to sat out the wheelrace
1 day 4s."

At this time Brindley is also exercising his
wit on an attempt at an improved steam-engine;
but though his ideas are good, it is hard to
bring into continuously good working order,
and after the close of entries about it in his
memorandum-book, when it seems to have
broken down for a second time, he underlines
the item "to Run about a Drinking 1s. 6d."
But he confined his despair to the loss of
a day and the expenditure of eighteen-pence.
Not long afterwards he had developed a
patent of his own, and erected, in seventeen
'sixty-three, for the Walker Colliery at
Newcastle, a steam-engine wholly of iron, which
was pronounced the most "complete and noble
piece of iron-work" that had, up to that
time, been produced. But the perfecting of the
steam-engine was then safe in the hands of
Watt, and Brindley had already turned into his
own path as the author of our English canal
system.

The young Duke of Bridgewater, vexed in
love by the frailty of fair women, had abjured
interest in their sex, had gone down to his
estate of Worsley, on the borders of Chat
Moss, and, to give himself something more
wholesome to think about than the sisters
Gunning and their fortunes, conferred with
John Gilbert, his land steward, as to the
possibility of cutting a canal by which the coals
found upon his Worsley estate might be readily
taken to market at Manchester. Manchester
then was a rising town, of which the manufacturers
were yet unaided by the steam-engine,
and there was no coal smoke but that which
arose from household fires. The roads out of
Manchester were so bad as to be actually closed
in winter, and in summer the coal, sold at the
pit mouth by the horse-load, was conveyed on
horses' backs at an addition to its cost of nine
or ten shillings a ton.

When the duke discussed with Gilbert old
abandoned and new possible schemes of water-
conveyance for his Worsley coal, Gilbert
advised the calling in of the ingenious James
Brindley of Leek, "the Schemer." When the
duke came into contact with Brindley, he at
once put trust in him, and gave him the direction
of the proposed work; whereupon he was
requested to base his advice upon what he
enters in his memorandum-book of jobs done as
an "ochilor" (ocular) "servey or a ricconitering."

Brindley examined the ground, and formed