Seven times the mill fell, till "the patience of my family and friends was exhausted." Then Peale invented an apparatus that would make the sails shut together like the petals of a flower when a high wind blew. No sooner was it installed than "I saw a dark cloud in the west, and in a short time after I heard the wind whistling, when I ran out and had the pleasure to see that the violence of the wind did not increase the velocity of the sails. . . . On seeing this, I almost danced with joy. . . . The invention of these sails for mills and that of my wooden bridges I consider the most important of any mechanical works of my invention." Peale promptly urged the City Council to pump all the water for Philadelphia by means of such mills; sourly a committee of the Council replied that "the whole front on the Schuylkill belonging " to the corporation at Fairmont would not afford sufficient room for one-half the number that would be necessary."

His children sighed with relief now that the windmill crisis was over, and waited for their father to settle down by the hearth in white-haired calm, but as bad luck would have it Peale saw in Balti­more "a fast-walking machine" that had just been invented in Ger­many and was called a velocipede; it was similar to an old-fashioned bicycle except that it lacked pedals. The painter hovered round it excitedly, and as soon as he got back to his farm began making con­trivances like it, first of iron and then of wood. According to an article that appeared during 1819 in the American Daily Adver­tiser, "This whimsical pedestrian accelerator having excited much curiosity, Mr. Peale has made one which is now deposited in the museum. He rides it around the walks of his garden, gets great pleasure from his expertness in manoeuvring it about." To his family's intense mortification, he rode it into Germantown, "dis­regarding," as he wrote, "the stare of the multitude, and it was pleasing to-gratify the children." While his sons and daughters watched in horror, the seventy-eight-year-old painter coasted whooping down the hills, his coat-tails flying. He was very happy.

" 'You are old, Father William,' the young man said, 'And your hair has become very white, And yet you incessantly stand on your head-Do you think, at your age, it is right?' "

Peale, that amateur farmer, amused Jefferson by writing him advice on how to plough; Jefferson replied that he had been plough­ing that way for half a century. The two old men's letters grew in­creasingly affectionate as the years closed around them. In 1813 the ex-President, who was becoming more and more infirm, wrote to his contemporary: "When I observe that you take an active part in the bodily labour on the farm, your zeal and age give me uneasi­ness for the result." Four years later he commented wistfully: "I admire you in the variety of vocations to which you can give your attention. I cannot do this. I wish always to be reading and am vexed with everything that takes me from it." Replying in 1818 to- a jubilant letter in which Peale announced that he had dis­covered a new kind of spectacles, Jefferson remarked that he was "at a loss to understand how those of three-foot focus can be made conveniently to direct the operations of the human hand which can with difficulty be extended to that distance. However, the in­vention answers a useful purpose if it adds to your amusement, and I rejoice to learn that new improvements in your art [painting] increase your attachment to it; for one of the evils of age is the loss of interest in those employments which in earlier life con­stituted our happiness." In 1820 Jefferson wrote to Peale: "I can never be a day without thinking of you."

Peale busily visited Washington and Baltimore to execute por­traits, and in 1819 reported to Jefferson with his perennial op­timism: "My late portraits are much better than those I formerly painted—such is the opinion of the public—yet I cannot resist my inclination for mechanical labours as much as I ought." To the extreme horror of his younger children, who felt he was levelling another blow at their social position, Peale had thrown himself enthusiastically into experimenting with the construction of false teeth; the loss of his own teeth had got him started. Searching for a suitable substance from which to make them, he tried ivory and then the teeth of seacows. When he found that these decayed in the mouth, he experimented with the teeth of all the animals in his museum. The hardest, he discovered, were those of hogs, but "they could very seldom be had sufficiently large." Finally Dr. Planteau, a French dentist practising in Philadelphia, made him a set from porcelain. Delighted with this new substance, Peale determined to perfect its use, and in the plant of a manufacturer named Abraham Miller he made valuable experiments in glazing porcelain teeth and attaching them to the plates.