at the family meals as usual, and next day he lectured twice,
punctually fulfilling his engagements; but the exertion of speaking
was followed by a second attack of hemorrhage. He now became
seriously ill, and it was doubted whether he would survive the night.
But he did survive; and during his convalescence he was appointed to
an important public office--that of director of the Scottish
Industrial Museum, which involved a great amount of labor, as well as
lecturing, in his capacity of professor of technology, which he held
in connection with the office.

From this time forward, his "dear museum," as he called it, absorbed
all his surplus energies. While busily occupied in collecting models
and specimens for the museum, he filled up his odds-and-ends of time
in lecturing in Ragged Schools and Medical Missionary Societies. He
gave himself no rest, either of mind or body; and "to die working"
was the fate he envied. His mind would not give in, but his poor body
was forced to yield, and a sever attack of hemorrhage--bleeding from
both lungs and stomach--compelled him to relax in his labors. "For a
month, or some forty days," he wrote--"a dreadful Lent--the wind has
blown geographically from 'Araby the blest,' but thermometrically
from Iceland the accursed. I have been made a prisoner of war, hit by
an icicle in the lungs, and have shivered and burned alternately for
a large portion of the last month, and spat blood till I grew pale
with coughing. Now I am better, and to-morrow I give my concluding
lecture (on technology), thankful that I have contrived,
notwithstanding all my troubles, to early on without missing a
lecture to the last day of the Faculty of Arts, to which I belong."

How long was it to last? He himself began to wonder, for he had long
felt his life as if ebbing away. At length he became languid, weary,
and unfit for work; even the writing of a letter cost him a painful
effort, and he felt "as if to lie down and sleep were the only things
worth doing." Yet shortly after, to help a Sunday school, he wrote
his "Five Gateways of Knowledge," as a lecture, and afterward
expanded it into a book. He also recovered strength sufficient to
enable him to proceed with his lectures to the institutions to which
he belonged, besides on various occasions undertaking to do other
people's work. "I am looked upon as being as mad," he wrote to his
brother, "because on a hasty notice, I took a defaulting lecturer's
place at