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of Lady Blessington. Whilst Solomon was painting 'The Gossips' for me, he was engaged on a portrait of Jenny Lind, who, by the way, used to live here in The Boltons. Solomon told me of some of the great singer's odd expressions which she made use of whilst her portrait was in progress of being painted.

"'No, no,' she would cry, 'it's not like me! You haven't made my nose big enough. Don't you see my nose is all over my face? Oh! and look at my hair. It isn't green enough!'

"'Not green enough?' Solomon exclaimed.

"'No; don't you see that my hair is the colour of what you call hay before it is made?'"

The Library
From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry.

So, brimful of these stories, we sat down together by the fire. I heard of a most useful life—a successful career, conceived and carried out by the man who related it. Whatever success has fallen to Sir Robert Rawlinson's lot has been honestly laboured for. Sir Robert to-day is a real example, a personified definition of—Industry. He refers to it all very quietly—there is not a tittle of over-estimated powers about his speech. He started life with a purpose—he has lived it with a will. Born at Bristol on the 28th February, 1810—his father, Thomas Rawlinson, of Chorley, Lancashire, was a mason and builder, his mother a Devonshire woman. Sir Robert barely went to school—he frankly declares that his education only cost three-halfpence a week. He worked at his father's business at Chorley, and before he was twenty-one he was a stone-mason, bricklayer, millwright, carpenter, sawyer, and even a navvy, and all with a view of grounding himself in everything of a practical nature which would tend to make him an engineer—a profession on which his heart was set.

"When I was one-and-twenty," he said, as he contemplatively turned over the past pages of his life in his mind, "I was residing at Liverpool and entered the Dock office under Jesse Hartley, the greatest dock engineer the world has seen. I remained there for five years, for the last three of which I was Hartley's confidential draughtsman and adviser. Then I went on to the London and Birmingham Railway, the Blisworth contract, under Robert Stephenson. Stephenson was remarkably considerate and indeed a gentleman, and treated me with almost brotherly kindness. I was in charge of the masonry. The railway was in a cutting about two miles long and sixty feet deep through rock, with an intervening bed of clay, which had to be cut out and then filled in with masonry. I was then twenty-six."

Mr. Rawlinson completed the work successfully. At the age of thirty, he once more went to Liverpool, filling the post of Assistant Surveyor to the Corporation. He remained there for two and a half years, when, on the recommendation of his first employer—Jesse Hartley—he was appointed engineer to the celebrated Bridgwater Canal. Then I listened to the story of how he came to design and complete the wonderful hollow brick ceiling over St. George's Hall, Liverpool; the lightest work of its kind, probably, in the world.

"Whilst I was in Liverpool," Sir Robert said, "I met young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, the architect of St. George's Hall. He was