idly lounging about and reading Westward Ho! for the second time instead of taking to electricity or picking up nautical information.'
During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into 'kinks' from having been so slackly laid, and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this ravelled cable were for a long time exhibited as a curiosity in the windows of Messrs. Newall & Co's. shop in the Strand, where we remember to have seen them.
By July 5 the whole of the six-wire cable had been recovered, and a portion of the three-wire cable, the rest being abandoned as unfit for use, owing to its twisted condition. Their work was over, but an unfortunate accident marred its conclusion. On the evening of the 2nd the first mate, while on the water unshackling a buoy, was struck in the back by a fluke of the ship's anchor as she drifted, and so severely injured that he lay for many weeks at Cagliari. Jenkin's knowledge of languages made him useful as an interpreter; but in mentioning this incident to Miss Austin, he writes, 'For no fortune would I be a doctor to witness these scenes continually. Pain is a terrible thing.'
In the beginning of 1859 he made the acquaintance of Sir William Thomson, his future friend and partner. Mr. Lewis Gordon, of Messrs. R. S. Newall & Co., afterwards the earliest professor of engineering in a British University, was then in Glasgow seeing Sir William's instruments for testing and signalling on the first Atlantic cable during the six weeks of its working. Mr. Gordon said he should like to show them to 'a young man of remarkable ability,' engaged at their Birkenhead Works, and Jenkin, being
