open up new markets for
their products.

At home he lived the life of a country gentleman, enjoying his garden and
grounds, and indulging his love of nature, which, through all his busy
life, had never left him. It was not until the year 1845 that he took an
active interest in horticultural pursuits. Then he began to build new
melon-houses, pineries, and vineries, of great extent; and he now seemed
as eager to excel all other growers of exotic plants in his
neighbourhood, as he had been to surpass the villagers of Killingworth in
the production of gigantic cabbages and cauliflowers some thirty years
before. He had a pine-house built 68 feet in length and a pinery 140
feet. Workmen were constantly employed in enlarging them, until at
length he had no fewer than ten glass forcing-houses, heated with hot
water, which he was one of the first in that neighbourhood to make use of
for such a purpose. He did not take so much pleasure in flowers as in
fruits. At one of the county agricultural meetings, he said that he
intended yet to grow pineapples at Tapton as big as pumpkins. The only
man to whom he would "knock under" was his friend Paxton, the gardener to
the Duke of Devonshire; and he was so old in the service, and so skilful,
that he could scarcely hope to beat him. Yet his "Queen" pines did take
the first prize at a competition with the Duke,--though this was not
until shortly after his death, when the plants had become more fully
grown. His grapes also took the first prize at Rotherham, at a
competition open to all England. He was extremely successful in
producing melons, having invented a method of suspending them in baskets
of wire gauze, which, by relieving the stalk from tension, allowed
nutrition to proceed more freely, and better enabled the fruit to grow
and ripen.

He took much pride also in his growth of cucumbers. He raised them very
fine and large, but he could not make them grow straight. Place them as
he would, notwithstanding all his propping of them, and humouring them by
modifying the application of heat and the admission of light for the
purpose of effecting his object, they would still insist on growing
crooked in their own way. At last he had a number of glass cylinders
made at Newcastle, for the purpose of an experiment; into these the
growing cucumbers were inserted, and then he succeeded in growing them
perfectly straight. Carrying one of the new products into his house one
day, an