ited for
a month--two--three months--but heard nothing, saw nothing of my
invention. I wrote, but could get no answer; I called, but could see
no editor; and at last was meditating some personal vengeance, when I
received a note. It was then much after midsummer, few people in town,
and the magazines were printing anything--as no one reads them in the
dog-days--stating that if Lieutenant Sickleton would procure a woodcut
of his pump, the paper descriptive of it should appear in the next
number. That was a civil way of asking me for five pounds; but help
there was none, and so I complied.

"At length I read in the list of the contents, 'Lieutenant Sickleton's
New Hand Pump, with an Illustration'--and my heart bounded at the words.
It was the nineteenth article--near the end of the number. I forget what
the others were--something, of course, about Waterloo, and Albuera, and
the Albert chako, and such-like stuff. My pump, I knew, put it where
they would, was _the_ paper of the month. This feeling was a little
abated on finding that, as I walked down Fleet Street on the day
of publication, I did n't perceive any sign of public notice or
recognition; no one said as I passed, 'That's Sickleton, the fellow who
invented the new pump.' I remembered, however, that if my _pump_ was
known, _I_ was not as yet, and that though the portrait of my invention
had become fame, my own was still in obscurity.

"I betook myself to the office of the journal, expecting there at least
to find that enthusiastic reception the knowledge of my merits must
secure, but hang me, if one of the clerks--as to the editor, there was
no seeing him--took the slightest trouble about me. I told him, with, I
trust, a pardonable swelling of the bosom, that I was 'Sickleton.' I
did n't say the famous Sickleton, and I thought I was modest in the
omission; but he was n't in the least struck by the announcement, and I
quitted the place in disgust.

"Worse than all, when I came to read over my paper, I found, by the
errors of the press, that the whole diagram was spoiled. The letters had
been misplaced, and the fiend himself, if he wanted it, couldn't work
my pump. You see that C D represented the angular crank, F was the
stop-cock, and T the trigger that closed the piston. Hang me, if they
did n't make F the trigger, and instead of B being the cistern, it was
made the jet; so that when you began to work, all the water squirted
through the sluices at OPQ over the