early erect, although
six feet three in height, and has nothing of the somnolence of old age.
He drives out every day, gets up at eleven, and goes to bed at nine. His
diet is chiefly milk and old port wine, with occasionally a little soup
or bread and butter. He still enjoys the delights of beneficence, which
are among the keenest known to mortals, and pleases himself this year by
giving checks of ninety-nine pounds to benevolent objects, a pound for
each year that he has had the happiness of living.

MARQUIS OF WORCESTER,

INVENTOR OF THE STEAM-ENGINE.

In the English county of Monmouthshire, near Wales, a region of coal
mines and iron works, there are the ruins of Raglan Castle, about a mile
from a village of the same name. To these ruins let pilgrims repair who
delight to visit places where great things began; for here once dwelt
the Marquis of Worcester, who first made steam work for men. The same
family still owns the site; as indeed it does the greater part of the
county; the head of the family being now styled the Duke of Beaufort.
The late Lord Raglan, commander of the English forces in the Crimea,
belonged to this house, and showed excellent taste in selecting for his
title a name so interesting. Perhaps, however, he never thought of the
old tower of Raglan Castle, which is still marked and indented where the
second Marquis of Worcester set up his steam-engine two hundred and
twenty years ago. Very likely he had in mind the time when the first
marquis held the castle for Charles I. against the Roundheads, and
baffled them for two months, though he was then eighty-five years of
age. It was the son of that valiant and tough old warrior who put steam
into harness, and defaced his ancestral tower with a ponderous and
imperfect engine.

For many centuries before his time something had been known of the power
of steam; and the Egyptians, a century or more before Christ, had even
made certain steam toys, which we find described in a manuscript written
about 120 B. C., at Alexandria, by a learned compiler and inventor named
Hero. One of these was in the form of a man pouring from a cup a
libation to the gods. The figure stood upon an altar, and it was
connected by a pipe with a kettle of water underneath. On lighting a
fire under the kettle, the water was forced up through the figure, and
flowed out of the cup upon the altar. Another toy was a revolving copper
globe, which was kept in motion by _the escape_