It was in that room at the
Hermitage--adjoining the Winter Palace--set apart for the relics of
Peter. Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American
industry--one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of
inventors' rights.
Suddenly from the inventor, pulling over some old dust-covered machines
in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were natural indeed.
In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular
forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself: specimens
of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there unheeded
a hundred fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his
workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and
gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris Universal
Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary;
and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten
machine of Peter's.
Yet, though Peter fought so well and thought so well, he made some
mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses.
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