early and late, and suffering frequently from cold and hunger,
he broke down under the unequal strain, and was obliged to return to
his parents for a time until health was regained.

Always struggling against great odds, he returned to Glasgow when his
trade was mastered, and began to make mathematical instruments, for
which, however, he found little sale. Then, to help eke out a living,
he began to make and mend other instruments,--fiddles, guitars, and
flutes,--and finally built an organ,--a very superior one, too,--with
several additions of his own invention.

A commonplace incident enough it seemed, in the routine of his daily
occupation, when, one morning, a model of Newcomen's engine was brought
to him for repair, yet it marked the turning point in his career, which
ultimately led from poverty and struggle to fame and affluence.

Watt's practiced eye at once perceived the defects in the Newcomen
engine, which, although the best then in existence could not do much
better or quicker work than horses. Filled with enthusiasm over the
plans which he had conceived for the construction of a really powerful
engine, he immediately set to work, and spent two months in an old
cellar, working on a model. "My whole thoughts are bent on this
machine," he wrote to a friend. "I can think of nothing else."

So absorbed had he become in his new work that the old business of
making and mending instruments had declined. This was all the more
unfortunate as he was no longer struggling for himself alone. He had
fallen in love with, and married, his cousin, Margaret Miller, who
brought him the greatest happiness of his life. The neglect of the only
practical means of support he had reduced Watt and his family to the
direst poverty. More than once his health failed, and often the brave
spirit was almost broken, as when he exclaimed in heaviness of heart,
"Of all the things in the world, there is nothing so foolish as
inventing."

Five years had passed since the model of the Newcomen engine had been
sent to him for repair before he succeeded in securing a patent on his
own invention. Yet five more long years of bitter drudgery, clutched in
the grip of poverty, debt, and sickness, did the brave inventor,
sustained by the love and help of his noble wife, toil through. On his
thirty-fifth birthday he said, "To-day I enter the thirty-fifth year of
my life, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of
good in the world; b