cation could be
established between Europe and America. He plunged into the
undertaking with all the force of his being. The preliminary work
included the construction of a telegraph line one thousand miles long,
from New York to St. John's, Newfoundland. Through four hundred miles
of almost unbroken forest they had to build a road as well as a
telegraph line across Newfoundland. Another stretch of one hundred and
forty miles across the island of Cape Breton involved a great deal of
labor, as did the laying of a cable across the St. Lawrence.

By hard work he secured aid for his company from the British
government, but in Congress he encountered such bitter opposition from
a powerful lobby that his measure only had a majority of one in the
Senate. The cable was loaded upon the _Agamemnon_, the flag ship of
the British fleet at Sebastopol, and upon the _Niagara_, a magnificent
new frigate of the United States Navy; but, when five miles of cable
had been paid out, it caught in the machinery and parted. On the
second trial, when two hundred miles at sea, the electric current was
suddenly lost, and men paced the decks nervously and sadly, as if in
the presence of death. Just as Mr. Field was about to give the order
to cut the cable, the current returned as quickly and mysteriously as
it had disappeared. The following night, when the ship was moving but
four miles an hour and the cable running out at the rate of six miles,
the brakes were applied too suddenly just as the steamer gave a heavy
lurch, breaking the cable.

Field was not the man to give up. Seven hundred miles more of cable
were ordered, and a man of great skill was set to work to devise a
better machine for paying out the long line. American and British
inventors united in making a machine. At length in mid-ocean the two
halves of the cable were spliced and the steamers began to separate,
the one headed for Ireland, the other for Newfoundland, each running
out the precious thread, which, it was hoped, would bind two continents
together. Before the vessels were three miles apart, the cable parted.
Again it was spliced, but when the ships were eighty miles apart, the
current was lost. A third time the cable was spliced and about two
hundred miles paid out, when it parted some twenty feet from the
_Agamemnon_, and the vessels returned to the coast of Ireland.

Directors were disheartened, the public skeptical, capitalists were
shy, and but for the i