well enough to fight, and scheme, and bustle about in the eager crowd here (in London) for awhile now and then; but not for a lifetime. What I have now is just perfect. Study for winter, action for summer, lovely country for recreation, a pleasant town for talk.'
The liberality of the Scotch universities allowed him to continue his private enterprises, and the summer holiday was long enough to make a trip round the globe.
The following June he was on board the Great Eastern while she laid the French Atlantic cable from Brest to St. Pierre. Among his shipmates were Sir William Thomson, Sir James Anderson, C. F. Varley, Mr. Latimer Clark, and Willoughby Smith. Jenkin's sketches of Clark and Varley are particularly happy. At St. Pierre, where they arrived in a fog, which lifted to show their consort, the William Cory, straight ahead, and the Gulnare signalling a welcome, Jenkin made the curious observation that the whole island was electrified by the battery at the telegraph station.
Jenkin's position at Edinburgh led to a partnership in cable work with Sir William Thomson, for whom he always had a love and admiration. Jenkin's clear, practical, and business-like abilities were doubtless an advantage to Sir William, relieving him of routine, and sparing his great abilities for higher work. In 1870 the siphon recorder, for tracing a cablegram in ink, instead of merely flashing it by the moving ray of the mirror galvanometer, was introduced on long cables, and became a source of profit to Jenkin and Varley as well as to Sir William, its inventor.
In 1873 Thomson and Jenkin were engineers for the Western and Brazilian cable. It was manufactured by Messrs. Hooper & Co., of Millwall, and the wire was coated with india-rubber, then a new insulator. The
