The mill farm at
Stowting had been saved out of the wreck; and here he built himself
a house on the Mexican model, and made the two ends meet with
rustic thrift, gathering dung with his own hands upon the road and
not at all abashed at his employment. In dress, voice, and manner,
he fell into mere country plainness; lived without the least care
for appearances, the least regret for the past or discontentment
with the present; and when he came to die, died with Stoic
cheerfulness, announcing that he had had a comfortable time and was
yet well pleased to go. One would think there was little active
virtue to be inherited from such a race; and yet in this same
voluntary peasant, the special gift of Fleeming Jenkin was already
half developed. The old man to the end was perpetually inventing;
his strange, ill-spelled, unpunctuated correspondence is full (when
he does not drop into cookery receipts) of pumps, road engines,
steam-diggers, steam-ploughs, and steam-threshing machines; and I
have it on Fleeming's word that what he did was full of ingenuity -
only, as if by some cross destiny, useless.
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