t boons to
humanity, it will not be necessary to enlarge on it.

A brighter day seemed at last to be dawning, and a most curious
happening, just at this time, came to the inventor as an auspicious omen.
In stringing his wires between the two committee rooms he had to descend
into a vault beneath them which had been long unused. A workman, who was
helping him, went ahead and carried a lamp, and, as he glanced around the
chamber, Morse noticed something white on a shelf at one side. Curious to
see what this could be, he went up to it, when what was his amazement to
find that it was a plaster cast of that little statuette of the Dying
Hercules which had won for him the Adelphi Gold Medal so many years
before in London. There was the token of his first artistic success
appearing to him out of the gloom as the harbinger of another success
which he hoped would also soon emerge from behind the lowering clouds.

The apparently mysterious presence of the little demigod in such an
out-of-the-way place was easily explained. Six casts of the clay model
had been made before the original was broken up. One of these Morse had
kept for himself, four had been given to various institutions, and one to
his friend Charles Bulfinch, who succeeded Latrobe as the architect of
the Capitol. A sinister fate seemed to pursue these little effigies, for
his own, and the four he had presented to different institutions, were
all destroyed in one way and another. After tracing each one of these
five to its untimely end, he came to the conclusion that this evidence of
his youthful genius had perished from the earth; but here, at last, the
only remaining copy was providentially revealed to the eyes of its
creator, having undoubtedly been placed in the vault for safe-keeping and
overlooked. It was cheerfully returned to him. By him it was given to his
friend, the Reverend E. Goodrich Smith, and by the latter presented to
Yale University, where it now rests in the Fine Arts Building.

So ended the year 1842, a decade since the first conception of the
telegraph on board the Sully, and it found the inventor making his last
stand for recognition from that Government to which he had been so loyal,
and upon which he wished to bestow a priceless gift. With the dawn of the
new year, a year destined to mark an epoch in the history of
civilization, his flagging spirits were revived, and he entered with zest
on what proved to be his final and successful struggle.