220 RECOLLECTIONS OF FORTY YEARS. 



solitude which her death inflicted on him, he liqui- 

 dated his retiring pension as captain in the army, and 

 got admitted to the Hotel des Invalides, where he 

 died of cholera in 1832, at the age of eighty-one, 

 leaving to his children no other inheritance than the 

 example of the laborious life which his eldest son so 

 loyally followed. 



FULTON. 



At the close of the last century, a young American, 

 who had heen at school while the "War of Indepen- 

 dence was in progress, came to study art, for which 

 he showed great aptitude, in France, although he had 

 no special genius for invention, he was endowed with 

 great readiness in the study of mechanical discoveries, 

 and with a perseverance which no rebuff could retire. 



Of Irish origin, and born at Little Britain (Penn- 

 sylvania) in 1765 of parents who had emigrated in 

 a state of great poverty, Eobert Fulton was first 

 apprenticed to a jeweller, and afterwards to a painter. 

 At twenty years of age he left America and passed 

 ten years in England, where he devoted himself 

 entirely to the study of mechanics, coming to Paris 

 in 1796. For five years he concentrated his attention 

 upon submarine navigation, and upon the means of 

 exploding at a given point boxes filled with gun- 

 powder, so as to blow up vessels on the water. 



The French Government refusing to adopt this 

 invention, Fulton was about returning to America, 



