The Famons Blind Engineer of Belfast. 21 



Mitchell seems to have enjoyed his school life at the Belfast 

 Academy under Dr. Bruce for about four years, having gone there 

 at the age of ten or eleven, and acquired a good deal of learning 

 in spite of failing sight. Towards the end of this time Dr. Bruce 

 was puzzled by the irregularity of Mitchell's handwriting and his 

 difficulty in reading, but, after finding the cause, was careful to 

 make the boy's work as easy as he could. Mitchell spoke after- 

 wards with gratitude of the consideration shown him by the doctor, 

 who was otherwise a master of the strict old school. 



Before he was sixteen years old, Mitchell s sight had become Su 

 bad that he could not see to read, but it would seem that he had 

 already stored his memory so well as to give him pegs on which to 

 hang much that he gained afterwards from reading and con- 

 versation. His family constantly applied to him for help in 

 geography, history, counting, and even spelling. 



We have little record of his doings after this, until the year 

 1798, memorable in Ireland as the year of the Insurrection. 

 His cousin's daughter, Mary Williams, tells how her mother, then 

 quite a girl, with her two sisters, three handsome young Miss 

 Fergusons, were hastily sent off in a sail boat to Portpatrick and 

 on to friends in Scotland, to be out of danger, taking with them 

 their young cousin, Alexander Mitchell, then 18. 



Very near to Eglinby Cottage there lived in what had been part 

 of the Yelverton pleasure grounds Mr. and Mrs. Banks, with their 

 only child, a daughter. 



Alexander Mitchell married Mary Banks in 1801, when he was 

 21 and she two years older, and his mother was so greatly dis- 

 pleased with him, for what she doubtless considered a rash act, 

 that for more than a year she would not see him. She however 

 became reconciled after the birth of the first child, a boy, and was 

 afterwards visited and loved by all her five grandchildren, up to 

 the time of her death, nineteen years later. One can understand 

 the reconciliation to have been complete, from the sense of relief 

 she must have felt in seeing that her son had a wife so entirely 

 devoted to his interests, and so full of practical common sense. 



His appearance was that of a strong and active man. He 



