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Nos. 1 and 2 were found to be faulty in both material and design, cast metal proving unfit for heating surfaces placed directly over the fire, as it cracked as soon as any scale formed. No. 3. Wrought-iron tubes were substituted for the cast-iron heating tubes, the ends being brightened, laid in moulds, and the headers cast on. The steam and water capacity in this design were insufficient to secure regularity of action, there being no reserve upon which to draw during firing or when the water was fed intermittently. The attempt to dry the steam by superheating it in the nest of tubes forming the steam space was found to be impracticable. The steam delivered was either wet, dry or superheated, according to the rate at which it was being drawn from the boiler. Sediment was found to lodge in the lowermost point of the boiler at the rear end and the exposed portions cracked off at this point when subjected to the furnace heat.

And yet it seems very difficult for any person to realise what is the philosophical conclusion, namely, that the work of each of us matters very little to the world, but that it matters very much to ourselves that we should have some work to do. We seem to be a very feeble-minded race in this respect, that we require to be constantly bribed and tempted by illusions. I have known men of force and vigour both in youth and middle life who had a strong sense of the value and significance of their work; as age came upon them, the value of their work gradually disappeared; they were deferred to, consulted, outwardly reverenced, and perhaps all the more scrupulously and compassionately in order that they might not guess the lamentable fact that their work was done and that the forces and influences were in younger hands. But the men themselves never lost the sense of their importance. I knew an octogenarian clergyman who declared once in my presence that it was ridiculous to say that old men lost their faculty of dealing with affairs.

Some Slavophiles saw even in Peter's work a process of progressing from nationality to universality. In his time there was the same yearning toward its peaceful ideal. The "Old Russia" party wanted Peter to renounce war and conquest. Alexis, his own murdered son, worked with this element which was very largely representative of the nation. To them, St. Petersburg, then a new and growing capitol, was typical of change, unrest and falsity; Moscow was in their hearts the only capital, typical of Russia's old comfort and quiet. Many nobles antagonized Peter, but he swept them aside, imprisoning them or sending them to the gallows. Like Russia's slight resistance to Rurik and others, and to the Tartars, so was her feebleness before Peter the Great, who was himself, however, by no means an accomplished military leader, but an enlightened barbarian, dealing with a people whom writers and observers declare to be endowed with conspicuous traits of humility, scarcely found in the Christian nations of the western world.

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