but in mentioning this
incident to Miss Austin, he writes, 'For no fortune would I be a doctor
to witness these scenes continually. Pain is a terrible thing.'

In the beginning of 1859 he made the acquaintance of Sir William
Thomson, his future friend and partner. Mr. Lewis Gordon, of Messrs. R.
S. Newall & Co., afterwards the earliest professor of engineering in a
British University, was then in Glasgow seeing Sir William's instruments
for testing and signalling on the first Atlantic cable during the six
weeks of its working. Mr. Gordon said he should like to show them to 'a
young man of remarkable ability,' engaged at their Birkenhead Works, and
Jenkin, being telegraphed for, arrived next morning, and spent a week
in Glasgow, mostly in Sir William's class-room and laboratory at the old
college. Sir William tells us that he was struck not only with Jenkin's
brightness and ability, but with his resolution to understand everything
spoken of; to see, if possible, thoroughly into every difficult
question, and to slur over nothing. 'I soon found,' he remarks, 'that
thoroughness of honesty was as strongly engrained in the scientific
as in the moral side of his character.' Their talk was chiefly on
the electric telegraph; but Jenkin was eager, too, on the subject of
physics. After staying a week he returned to the factory; but he began
experiments, and corresponded briskly with Sir William about cable
work. That great electrician, indeed, seems to have infected his visitor
during their brief contact with the magnetic force of his personality
and enthusiasm.

The year was propitious, and, in addition to this friend, Fortune about
the same time bestowed a still better gift on Jenkin. On Saturday,
February 26, during a four days' leave, he was married to Miss Austin
at Northiam, returning to his work the following Tuesday. This was the
great event of his life; he was strongly attached to his wife, and his
letters reveal a warmth of affection, a chivalry of sentiment, and
even a romance of expression, which a casual observer would never have
suspected in him. Jenkin seemed to the outside world a man without a
heart, and yet we find him saying in the year 1869, 'People may write
novels, and other people may write poems, but not a man or woman among
them can say how happy a man can be who is desperately in love with his
wife after ten years of marriage.' Five weeks before his death he
wrote to her, 'Your first letter from Bournemo