oth to himself and to the nation, he had in these months much
to encourage him. "All is going on as well as I could wish, or even as I
could accomplish, were destiny at my command," he wrote on the 31st of
May. "The Portsmouth engines now meet the approbation of all the
authorities of the yard, and the Admiralty are so satisfied that they
have given me the building of a steamship to put them in, in lieu of
placing them in the old _Firefly_." "Nothing," he said in a letter
written a week or two later, "can exceed the perfection of the work
which the Bramahs have put into the _Janus_'s engines." "The
experimental engine at Portsmouth," he wrote on the 3rd of July,
"continues to perform admirably, beating all others in the yard in point
of vacuum, which, you know, is the test of power." "The engines will
commence being put together in ten or fourteen days," we read in another
letter dated the 10th of July; "after that we shall make rapid progress.
The _Janus_ is now completing--that is, being coppered--and having the
part of her deck laid down which was left off for the purpose of getting
the boilers on board. My patent boilers will be tried by authority of
the Admiralty about the 20th, and I hope for a favourable result." The
trial, postponed till the 1st of August, was satisfactory. "We have
tried the boilers of the _Janus_," he wrote on that day, "and the result
is most triumphant, having, with slack firing, ten and a half pounds of
water evaporated by each pound of coal." "I have just returned from
Portsmouth," he had written five days before, "where I had the pleasure
to find my engine exceeding even all that it had done before--the
vacuum, with all the work on, being 28-1/2, two inches above that of any
other engine in the dockyard. Mr. Taplin, the chief engineer, is quite
delighted with it." "Sir George Cockburn and Sir John Barrow, permanent
Secretary of the Admiralty, saw my engine yesterday," he wrote on the
24th of October, concerning the machine being built by the Bramahs for
the _Janus_; "and so did Lord Brougham; all of whom were well pleased
with my explanation of its principles and the appearance of the
workmanship. It is now being pulled to pieces, in order to its being
sent to Chatham and set up on board the _Janus_, whose boilers, by my
request, are again to be officially tested as to their evaporative
power, and that, too, by the Woolwich authorities, whose boilers have
been beaten one-third by the evapor